We explore the electronic structure and topological phase diagram of heterostructures formed of graphene and ternary bismuth tellurohalide layers. We show that mechanical strain inherently present in fabricated samples could induce a topological phase transition in single-sided heterostructures, turning the sample into a novel experimental realisation of a time reversal invariant topological insulator. We construct an effective tight binding description for low energy excitations and fit the models parameters to ab initio band structures. We propose a simple approach for predicting phase boundaries as a function of mechanical distortions and hence gain a deeper understanding on how the topological phase in the considered system may be engineered.
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