Spin polarization of the quantum spin Hall edge states

By C. Brüne, A. Roth, H. Buhmann, E. Hankiewicz, L. Molenkamp, J. Maciejko, Xiao-Liang Qi, Shoucheng Zhang. Nature Physics, 2011

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The prediction and experimental verification of the quantum spin Hall state marked the discovery of a new state of matter now known as topological insulators. Two-dimensional topological insulators exhibit the quantum spin-Hall effect, characterized by gapless spin-polarized counter-propagating edge channels. Whereas the helical character of these edge channels is now well established, experimental confirmation that the transport in the edge channels is spin polarized is still outstanding. We report experiments on nanostructures fabricated from HgTe quantum wells with an inverted band structure, in which a split gate technique allows us to combine both quantum spin Hall and metallic spin Hall transport in a single device. In these devices, the quantum spin Hall effect can be used as a spin current injector and detector for the metallic spin Hall effect, and vice versa, allowing for an all-electrical detection of spin polarization. The quantum spin Hall state is predicted to consist of two oppositely polarized spin currents travelling in opposite directions around the edges of a topological insulator. Non-local measurements of the transport in HgTe quantum wells confirm the polarized nature of these edge states.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/51c0bcd70fb8f3daf73da4bf41579c143a5ec097

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Basic principles of STT-MRAM cell operation in memory arrays (2013, background): “having large spin-diffusion length [104, 106] or enabling easy generation of the spin polarization [105].”