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Topological insulator: A next generation

Presentation · March 2017

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.30679.57766

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 Department of Physics

Topological insulator: a next

generation

Submitted To:-
Submitted by:-
Dr. Ajit K Patra
Yagyadev Bhardwaj
Assitant Professor
Int. M.Sc-B.Ed (3 Yrs) Physics
Department of Physics
IVth Semester
Central University of Rajasthan
2015 IMSBPH 023
Introduction:
The early discoveries in quantum mechanics explore the band theory of electric conduction in
1920 which comes as remarkable victory. It gave simple explanation to differentiate among crystalline
materials insulator, conductor and semiconductor. Material with partially filled bands are conductors,
where there plane wave states available to transmit electron across the bulk at low energy. The band
gap much smaller compare to semiconductor and insulator.

In a band of insulator, there are no partially filled bands or completely filled band are separated by an
energy gap from completely empty band; the gap represents the energy cost of mobilizing electrons.
After the time insulator can be divided according to their characteristics and properties as Band
insulator, Mott insulator, Anderson insulator, quantum hall insulator and topological insulator

Discovery of quantum Hall Effect in 1980’s make a platform to explore the mystery of condensed
matter as topological insulator. It has been introduce to characterize a large class of quantum
phenomena. Topological insulator is a triumph of topological order in condensed matter physics.
Topology:
Topology is a branch of mathematics that can used to describe such properties of objects
that do not change under continuous transformations. The most commonly used example is the
topological equivalency between a torus and a coffee mug since one can be continuously transformed
into another without closing or opening any holes. In other words topology is to show that it is possible
to reshape a torus into a coffee mug without making any cuts. Topological invariants are defined to
describe such structures.

It concerned with spatial properties that are preserved under continuous deformation of objects like
stretching and bending but no tearing or gluing. This means that an orange and a bowl are in the same
topological class but this a different class to a coffee mug or doughnut.

Topological insulators:
As the Name says it does not have anything to do with the shape, and the
interesting feature is not insulating. Topological insulators are material that are insulator at their interior
but can support the flow of electron on their surface. They will not conduct current through the bulk of
the material, but will carry current along the surface. The current that it carries has some special
properties that arise from the quantum nature of the material. The underlying case is time reversal
symmetry: their physics is independent of weather time is flowing backward or forward. These surfaces
are strong in form, maintained even in the presence of surface defects. Topological insulators have a
rather unusual history because – unlike almost every other exotic phase of matter- they were
characterized theoretically before being discovered experimentally.

Let consider a system of two dimensional film of electron with a large

magnetic field pointing up through it like, so the interesting thing that when the field gets very large
electrons go into the stage where they don’t conduct electricity in the bulk but they conducted around
the edge this is called hall conductance . The conductance of electricity around the film is in skipping
mode which shown in figure. These modes are called topologically protected. It means whatever we do
at the edge of layer like disorder it the conduction remains the mode just deforms to accommodate. It is
basically like the same way that the hole in the center of a donor is protected if we change the shape of
the donor or add bits of donor will take them away but hole survive kind of global property that is the
same with topological protection.

Now consider the two film layer which placed right top of each other in manner like one of layer
experience the magnetic field pointing upwards and other experience downward so the edge modes
going like opposite way in upper and lower film. This is quite impossible because we cannot make two
film in the same place experiencing the different magnetic field but it turns out the electron own
internal spin can act as the magnetic field and that’s is happen in topological insulator the modes of
conduction in upper or lower film directed in opposite direction and both are topologically protected.

How a topological Insulators Works:

Many of the most remarkable phenomena in condensed matter
physics are consequences of the quantum-mechanical behavior of electron in material.

The left image shows a simple way what happen inside an insulating state that an insulator in a material
in which there is no electrons that are not bound to specific place inside the material. Which shows in
picture as electrons are not really tracing out little elliptical orbits around specific atoms. Conductivity
that is precisely zero near a temperature of absolute zero. The insulating state occurs when an energy
gap separates the occupied and empty electronics states.

Now come to the topological insulator we need to take something that conducts and make it conduct
only on the edges. It make possible through different state of material called “Quantum Hall State”
Shows above right picture.

The Quantum Hall State has a dramatic quantum mechanical feature in its electrical transport. Its hall
conductance (which is nothing but the ratio of electrical current to the voltage perpendicular to the
current flow) is precisely quantized when the material near absolute zero. The quantum hall state
occurs when electrons confined to a 2-D interface b\w two semiconductor experience a strong magnetic
field. Then the field makes the electrons experience a perpendicular Lorentz force, which causes their
motion into a circle. And in an atom from quantum mechanics circular motion by orbitals have
quantized energies. This leads to an energy gap separating the occupied and empty states like in an
ordinary insulator. But At the boundary of the system the electrons undergo a different kind of motion,
because the circular orbits can bounce off the edge, leading to “skipping orbits”, as shown in figure.

In quantum theory, these skipping orbits lead to electronic states that propagate along the edge in one
direction only and do not have quantized energies. Given that there is no energy gap, these states can
conduct. The one-way flow makes the electronic transport in the edge states perfect normally, electrons
can scatter off impurities, but there are no backward-moving modes, the electrons have no choice but
to propagate forwards. This leads to what is known as “dissipation-less” transport by the edge states.
Because no electrons scatter and so no energy is lost as heat and is ultimately responsible for transport.

Quantum Hall Effect and Quantum spin Hall Effect:

A classically view of Hall Effect, When a conducting material is put in the magnetic field, and
there is an electric current through the conductor, a voltage difference which is transverse to the
magnetic field and the electric current occurs. This causes the electron to move in a circular path

“Quantum Hall Effect” In quantum version the electrons are waves, and just like the electrons in
an atom can only exist in certain orbits due to their wave properties, when you look at the Hall effect in
a quantum sense, the electrons can only be moving in circles whose radius satisfies the same sorts of
properties as the allowed orbits in an atom. The electrons can only occupy orbits of certain radii, and as
you increase the magnetic field, you change the radius of the orbit the electrons want to be in, but the
electrons can’t move to a new orbit until you hit the next special value of the field. This shows up as a
series of flat steps in the conductance of the material as you increase the magnetic field.

Quantum Spin Hall effect

Quantum Hall effect requires large magnetic fields, which can be unfavorable in
experimental realization. It also breaks time reversal symmetry. After the quantum spin Hall state was
proposed which is time reversal invariant. The basic idea of such state is that it does not show quantum
Hall effect. The Quantum Hall States not having mirror symmetry, since the electrons propagate only in
one direction along the edge and are not identical to their mirror image. In the quantum spin Hall Effect,
this is not the case. Electrons with spin up move in one direction and electrons with spin down in the
other. Such states, where spin and momentum are connected, are referred to as helical. The role of the
magnetic field is then taken over by the spin-orbit interaction.
The electron transport is shown in above figure for the quantum Hall effect and the quantum spin Hall
Effect. In 1D, an electron can move backwards or forwards. In 2D, the quantum Hall effect separates this
movement into two lanes. This transport described as not having mirror symmetry. It is clearly not time
reversal invariant. In the quantum spin Hall state, electron has four degrees of freedom. It can have spin
up or spin down and can move in two directions. In this state movement for one spin orientation and
movement in the opposite direction for the other spin orientation are combined. Under time reversal,
particle’s spin is reversed as well as its momentum. So the quantum spin Hall state is time reversal
invariant.

Experimental Discovery
The first key experiment in this field was the observation of the 2-D quantum
spin Hall Effect in a quantum well structure made by sandwiching a thin layer of mercury telluride (HgTe)
between layers of mercury cadmium telluride (HgxCd1-xTe). Earlier theoretical work had predicted that,
for an appropriate range of layer thicknesses, this structure should realize the 2D quantum spin Hall
Effect. Therefore the prediction was that the structure should conduct electricity only at its edge, and
also that the edge conductance at zero temperature should be 2e2 /h, (e =electron charge and
h=Planck’s constant).

Experimental results published in 2007 by a research group from the University of

Würzburg, Germany, led by Laurens Molenkamp measured the electrical transport properties of such
quantum-well structures and observed the predicted 2e2 /h conductance. It was also independent of the
width of the sample, as expected for a conductance resulting only from edge states.

Now measurements of electrical transport for 3D topological insulators there is an insulating gap on the
interior and always small bulk conductivity, and it is hard to separate the bulk and surface contributions
to the current. A probe that couples mainly to the surface would be better and researchers therefore
turned to angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). ARPES uses the photoelectric effect:
high-energy photons are shone onto the sample and electrons are ejected. By analyzing the energy,
momentum and spin of these electrons, the electronic structure and spin polarization of the surface
states can be directly measured. The first 3D topological insulator to be probed in this way was the
semiconducting alloy bismuth antimonide (Bix Sb1-x), which had previously been predicted theoretically
to be a topological insulator.
 In work published in 2008, a group from Princeton University lead by Zahid Hasan used ARPES
to map out the surface states of Bix Sb1-x and found that they had the special characteristic of a
topological insulator. This search led to the discovery that bismuth selenide (Bi2Se3) and bismuth
telluride (Bi2Te3) are topological insulators. These materials, which are well-known semiconductors with
strong spin–orbit interactions, have a relatively large bulk energy gap (0.3 eV for Bi2 Te3), which means
that they work at room temperature.

Applications and Characteristics:

 Majorana fermions: One of the most exciting potential applications of topological insulator
is the creation of Majorana fermions. These fundamental particles have been discussed in
particle physics for decades but there has been no definitive proof of their existence yet.
Majorana fermions can occur as quasiparticle in certain special superconductors. This is allowed
because a pair of quasiparticle can form a cooper pair and disappear into the superconductors.
Majorana fermions is requires a particular kind of superconductor called a topological
superconductor has not found. So, Majorana fermions could be made with an ordinary
superconductor (such as niobium) combined with a topological insulator. If a superconductor is
placed in contact with a topological insulator, the surface states become superconducting.
 Topological Insulator also deals with electronic transport experiment and also on coupling
Superconductor to topological insulator which conduct electricity with no resistance, make able
to build a practical quantum computer, which perform calculations using the laws of quantum
mechanics or making computer much faster than conventional computers at certain tasks such
as database searches and code breaking.
 Topological Quantum register explain how braiding of excitation can be used to generate logical
quantum gates also Topological insulators have the potential for “Spintronics” devices, infrared
detectors and thermoelectric applications.
  Topological insulators could bring the future computing platforms based on “spintronics”.
Conventional computers use the presence and absence of electric charge to represent ones and
zeros in a binary code needed to carry out computations. Spintronics uses the “spin state” of
electron to represents ones and zeros.

Conclusion:
Topological insulators are new and exciting field of physics that has developed in the last
decade. They are a great achievement for the theoretical physics, since their existence was first
predicted by theoretical approach. The classification of insulators into topological classes has proven to
be a powerful approach and can be extended to topological superconductors. Despite the fact that the
field of band theory has been around since the foundation of quantum mechanics almost a century ago,
it was realized in 2006 that there exist an explored band theory called topological band theory which
takes into account concept. It is quite remarkable and exciting that the theory used to understand
insulator and semiconductor for almost a century is incomplete and that the support of the new theory,
which includes topological effects, is being worked out during the lifetime.

 A further source of excitement in topological insulator field are the possibilities for realizing
exotic entities such as Dyons and magnetic monopoles, the latter predicted to exist in grand
unification and string.
 Superconductor with topological insulator host Majorana fermions which a platform for
topological quantum computation.
 Experiment challenges:
 Charge and spin transport measurement on topological insulators.
 The production of pure enough materials that are completely insulating in
the bulk.
 Super conducting structures: Create, detect Majorana bound state.
 Theoretical challenges:
 Further manifestations of Majorana Fermions and Non-Abelian states.
 Effects of disorder and interaction on surface.
 electron-electron interactions and fractional topological insulators
 Since we are starting to realize there is parallel universe out there with topological variants of
the things we have come to know the topologically trivial worlds. Many are convinced it will not
be a very long wait until the first topological variants of strongly correlated or interacting states
are able to be produced like a fractional quantum hall state or a topological Mott insulator.
 With roots in both semiconductors as well as in quantum field theory and the physics of strongly
correlated systems, this field brings together new combinations of scientists.
 Bibliography:

 Topological insulators: The next generation by Joel moore and Charles kane .
 Topological order and quantum spin Hall Effect (physics review letter) by C.L. kane,
E.J. mele.
 "Quantum transport of two-species Dirac fermions in dual-gated three-dimensional
topological insulators", by Yang Xu, Ireneusz Miotkowski, Yong P. Chen, Nature
Communications.
 ‘Topological insulators - promising for spintronics, quantum computers’ by Yang Xu
Purdue University doctoral student.
 Seminar 1b on “Topological insulators” by Dr. Ziga Kos, Prof. Dr. Dragan
Mihailovic´ University of Ljubljana.
 “ Topological insulators and superconductors” Rev. Mod. Phys. By Xiao-Liang and
Zhang (American Physical Society).
 Topological_insulators –article from http://www.scholarpedia.org.

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