Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells

By Bogdan Andrei Bernevig, T. Hughes, Shoucheng Zhang, Shou-Cheng Zhan. Science, 2006

5,556 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We show that the quantum spin Hall (QSH) effect, a state of matter with topological properties distinct from those of conventional insulators, can be realized in mercury telluride–cadmium telluride semiconductor quantum wells. When the thickness of the quantum well is varied, the electronic state changes from a normal to an “inverted” type at a critical thickness dc. We show that this transition is a topological quantum phase transition between a conventional insulating phase and a phase exhibiting the QSH effect with a single pair of helical edge states. We also discuss methods for experimental detection of the QSH effect.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/10e1607a040e305eca20ad891bd9ba3c28efe102

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Materials Chemistry

Citations in the corpus

The space group classification of topological band-insulators (2012, methodology): “ Hill, MA 02467, USA A. Model details We present details on the tight-binding models used to illustrate the phases in two dimensions. Speciﬁcally, we consider models of the form as introduced in Ref. [S1] which we generalize to the ﬁve Bravais structures in two dimensions. These models assume neares”
Topological frequency conversion in strongly driven quantum systems (2016, methodology): “In particular, we demonstrate that subjecting a single spin-1=2 particle to two elliptically polarized periodic waves can realize the chiral Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang (BHZ) model [30], which usually resides in two spatial dimensions (see Fig.”
Intrinsic magnetic topological insulators in van der Waals layered MnBi2Te4-family materials (2018, background): “Looking back to the history of the TI research, the first- and secondgeneration TIs are the HgTe/CdTe quantum wells (38, 39) and Bi-Sb alloys (43, 45, 46), respectively, which are very complex and difficult to study theoretically and experimentally.”
Bulk-Edge Correspondence for Two-Dimensional Topological Insulators (2012, background): “They have been theoretically predicted as a class [16] and as a specific compound [2], in which the effect was then observed [15,19].”