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The topological Anderson insulator phase in the Kane-Mele model

Orth, Christoph P. and Sekera, Tibor and Bruder, Christoph and Schmidt, Thomas L.. (2016) The topological Anderson insulator phase in the Kane-Mele model. Scientific Reports, 6. p. 24007.

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Abstract

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.
Faculties and Departments:05 Faculty of Science > Departement Physik > Physik > Theoretische Physik (Bruder)
UniBasel Contributors:Bruder, Christoph and Sekera, Tibor and Tiwari, Rakesh and Orth, Christoph
Item Type:Article, refereed
Article Subtype:Research Article
Publisher:Nature Publishing Group
e-ISSN:2045-2322
Note:Publication type according to Uni Basel Research Database: Journal article
Language:English
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Last Modified:12 Oct 2017 09:48
Deposited On:13 Feb 2017 14:37

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