Three-Dimensional Topological Insulator in a Magnetic Field: Chiral Side Surface States and Quantized Hall Conductance
Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics
2012-01-16 v2
Abstract
Low energy excitation of surface states of a three-dimensional topological insulator (3DTI) can be described by Dirac fermions. By using a tight-binding model, the transport properties of the surface states in a uniform magnetic field is investigated. It is found that chiral surface states parallel to the magnetic field are responsible to the quantized Hall (QH) conductance multiplied by the number of Dirac cones. Due to the two-dimension (2D) nature of the surface states, the robustness of the QH conductance against impurity scattering is determined by the oddness and evenness of the Dirac cone number. An experimental setup for transport measurement is proposed.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1103.3761,
title = {Three-Dimensional Topological Insulator in a Magnetic Field: Chiral Side Surface States and Quantized Hall Conductance},
author = {Yan-Yang Zhang and Xiang-Rong Wang and X. C. Xie},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1103.3761},
year = {2012}
}