Tunable Surface Conductivity in Bi2Se3 Revealed in Diffusive Electron Transport

By Jinglan Chen, Xugang He, Kehui Wu, Z. Ji, L. Lu, Jun-ren Shi, Jurgen Hubert Smet, Yong-qing Li. 2011

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We demonstrate that the weak antilocalization effect can serve as a convenient method for detecting decoupled surface transport in topological insulator thin films. In the regime where a bulk Fermi surface coexists with the surface states, the low-field magnetoconductivity is well described by the Hikami-Larkin-Nagaoka equation for single-component transport of noninteracting electrons. When the electron density is lowered, the magnetotransport behavior deviates from the single-component description and strong evidence is found for independent conducting channels at or near the bottom and top surfaces. The magnetic-field-dependent part of corrections to conductivity due to Zeeman energy is shown to be negligible for the fields relevant to the weak antilocalization despite considerable electron-electron interaction effects on the temperature dependence of the conductivity.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3ca50f3184d5716ecec1a0597f5ed74285394278