A Natural Topological Insulator
Abstract
The earth's crust and outer space are rich sources of technologically relevant materials which have found application in a wide range of fields. Well-established examples are diamond, one of the hardest known materials, or graphite as a suitable precursor of graphene. The ongoing drive to discover novel materials useful for (opto)electronic applications has recently drawn strong attention to topological insulators. Here, we report that Kawazulite, a mineral with the approximate composition Bi(Te,Se)(Se,S), represents a naturally occurring topological insulator whose electronic properties compete well with those of its synthetic counterparts. Kawazulite flakes with a thickness of a few tens of nanometers were prepared by mechanical exfoliation. They exhibit a low intrinsic bulk doping level and correspondingly a sizable mobility of surface state carriers of more than at low temperature. Based on these findings, further minerals which due to their minimized defect densities display even better electronic characteristics may be identified in the future.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1311.6637,
title = {A Natural Topological Insulator},
author = {Pascal Gehring and Hadj M. Benia and Ye Weng and Robert Dinnebier and Christian R. Ast and Marko Burghard and Klaus Kern},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.6637},
year = {2013}
}