The topological Anderson insulator phase in the Kane-Mele model
| Autor: | Orth, Christoph P., Sekera, Tibor, Bruder, Christoph, Schmidt, Thomas L. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Sci. Rep. 6, 24007 (2016) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1038/srep24007 |
| Popis: | It has been proposed that adding disorder to a topologically trivial mercury telluride/cadmium telluride (HgTe/CdTe) quantum well can induce a transition to a topologically nontrivial state. The resulting state was termed topological Anderson insulator and was found in computer simulations of the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model. Here, we show that the topological Anderson insulator is a more universal phenomenon and also appears in the Kane-Mele model of topological insulators on a honeycomb lattice. We numerically investigate the interplay of the relevant parameters, and establish the parameter range in which the topological Anderson insulator exists. A staggered sublattice potential turns out to be a necessary condition for the transition to the topological Anderson insulator. For weak enough disorder, a calculation based on the lowest-order Born approximation reproduces quantitatively the numerical data. Our results thus considerably increase the number of candidate materials for the topological Anderson insulator phase. Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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