Robustness of the helical edge states in topological insulators

Xue-Feng Wang; Yibin Hu; Hong Guo

doi:10.1103/PhysRevB.85.241402

Robustness of the helical edge states in topological insulators

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2012-11-26 v1

Authors: Xue-Feng Wang , Yibin Hu , Hong Guo

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Abstract

Topological insulators (TI) are materials having an energy band gap in the bulk and conducting helical electronic states on the surface. The helical states are protected by time reversal symmetry thus are expected to be robust against static disorder scattering. In this work we report atomistic first principles analysis of disorder scattering in two-probe transport junctions made of three dimensional TI material Bi2Se3. The robustness of the device against disorder scattering is determined quantitatively. Examining many different scattering configurations, a general trend emerges on how strong the perturbing potential and how it is spatially distributed that can derail the helical states on the Bi2Se3 surfaces.

Keywords

topological insulators helical edge states robustness disorder scattering bi2se3 first principles time reversal symmetry

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@article{arxiv.1211.5333,
  title  = {Robustness of the helical edge states in topological insulators},
  author = {Xue-Feng Wang and Yibin Hu and Hong Guo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1211.5333},
  year   = {2012}
}

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5 pages, 3 figures

Robustness of the helical edge states in topological insulators

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