Regensburg 2016 – scientific programme
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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten
DS 10: Transport: Topological Insulators - 2D
(Joint session of DS, HL, MA, O and TT, organized by TT)
DS 10.5: Talk
Monday, March 7, 2016, 16:00–16:15, H18
The topological Anderson insulator phase in the Kane-Mele model — Christoph P. Orth1, •Tibor Sekera1, Christoph Bruder1, and Thomas L. Schmidt2 — 1Department of Physics, University of Basel, Klingelbergstrasse 82, 4056 Basel, Switzerland — 2Physics and Materials Science Research Unit, University of Luxembourg, L-1511 Luxembourg
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.
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 between the parameters characterizing intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, extrinsic Rashba spin-orbit coupling and staggered sublattice potential. We establish the parameter regimes in which the topological Anderson insulator is found. For weak enough disorder, a calculation based on the lowest-order Born approximation reproduces the numerical data. Our results thus considerably increase the number of candidate materials for the topological Anderson insulator phase.