Edge conduction in monolayer WTe2

By Zaiyao Fei, T. Palomaki, Sanfeng Wu, Wenjin Zhao, Xinghan Cai, Bosong Sun, P. Nguyen, J. Finney, Xiaodong Xu, D. Cobden. Nature Physics, 2016

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Experiments showing that a single layer of WTe2 can conduct electricity along its edges while insulating in the interior suggests that this material is a two-dimensional topological insulator. A two-dimensional topological insulator (2DTI) is guaranteed to have a helical one-dimensional edge mode1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 in which spin is locked to momentum, producing the quantum spin Hall effect and prohibiting elastic backscattering at zero magnetic field. No monolayer material has yet been shown to be a 2DTI, but recently the Weyl semimetal WTe2 was predicted12 to become a 2DTI in monolayer form if a bulk gap opens. Here, we report that, at temperatures below about 100 K, monolayer WTe2 does become insulating in its interior, while the edges still conduct. The edge conduction is strongly suppressed by an in-plane magnetic field and is independent of gate voltage, save for mesoscopic fluctuations that grow on cooling due to a zero-bias anomaly, which reduces the linear-response conductance. Bilayer WTe2 also becomes insulating at low temperatures but does not show edge conduction. Many of these observations are consistent with monolayer WTe2 being a 2DTI. However, the low-temperature edge conductance, for contacts spacings down to 150 nm, never reaches values higher than ∼20 μS, about half the predicted value of e2/h, suggesting significant elastic scattering in the edge.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e59f7f61aecd9663251d6dec027af3977b1f2d8

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