Anomalous finite size effects on surface states in the topological insulator Bi 2 Se 3

By J. Linder, T. Yokoyama, A. Sudbø. 2009

247 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study how the surface states in the strong topological insulator ${\text{Bi}}_{2}{\text{Se}}_{3}$ are influenced by finite size effects and compare our results with those recently obtained for two-dimensional topological insulator HgTe. We demonstrate two important distinctions: (i) contrary to HgTe, the surface states in ${\text{Bi}}_{2}{\text{Se}}_{3}$ display a remarkable robustness towards decreasing the width $L$ down to a few nm thus ensuring that the topological surface states remain intact and (ii) the gapping due to the hybridization of the surface states features an oscillating exponential decay as a function of $L$ in ${\text{Bi}}_{2}{\text{Se}}_{3}$ in sharp contrast to HgTe. Our findings suggest that ${\text{Bi}}_{2}{\text{Se}}_{3}$ is suitable for nanoscale applications in quantum computing or spintronics. Also, we propose a way to experimentally detect both of the predicted effects.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22fcfa66439f65e01fe287c9da9895c72ad87f1e

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

  1. N. P. Armitage
  2. R. V. Aguilar
  3. L. Bilbro

In Materials Chemistry

  1. N. P. Armitage
  2. R. V. Aguilar
  3. L. Bilbro

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