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Low-temperature surface conduction in the Kondo insulator SmB$_6$

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 نشر من قبل Steven Wolgast
 تاريخ النشر 2012
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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We study the transport properties of the Kondo insulator SmB$_6$ with a specialized configuration designed to distinguish bulk-dominated conduction from surface-dominated conduction. We find that as the material is cooled below 4 K, it exhibits a crossover from bulk to surface conduction with a fully insulating bulk. We take the robustness and magnitude of the surface conductivity, as is manifest in the literature of SmB$_6$, to be strong evidence for the topological insulator metallic surface states recently predicted for this material.



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SmB6 is a strongly correlated mixed-valence Kondo insulator with a newly discovered surface state, proposed to be of non-trivial topological origin. However, the surface state dominates electrical conduction only below T* ~ 4 K limiting its scientifi c investigation and device application. Here, we report the enhancement of T * in SmB6 under the application of tensile strain. With 0.7% tensile strain we report surface dominated conduction at up to a temperature of 240 K, persisting even after the strain has been removed. This can be explained in the framework of strain-tuned temporal and spatial fluctuations of f-electron configurations, which might be generally applied to other mixed-valence materials. We note that this amount of strain can be indued in epitaxial SmB6 films via substrate in potential device applications.
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