Quantum Spin Hall Effect - in HgTe Quantum Wells

In HgTe Quantum Wells

Since graphene has extremely weak spin-orbit coupling, it is very unlikely to support a quantum spin Hall state at temperatures achievable with today's technologies. A very realistic theoretical proposal for the existence of the quantum spin Hall state has been put forward by Bernevig, Hughes and Zhang (BHZ) in Cadmium Telluride/Mercury Telluride/Cadmium Telluride (CdTe/HgTe/CdTe) quantum wells in which a thin (5-7 nanometers) sheet of HgTe is sandwiched between two sheets of CdTe, and subsequently experimentally realized (In fact, the proposed quantum wells do not exhibit the quantum spin Hall effect and should be regarded as topological insulators.) Different quantum wells of varying HgTe thickness can be built. When the sheet of HgTe in between the CdTe is thin, the system behaves like an ordinary insulator and does not conduct when the Fermi level resides in the band-gap. When the sheet of HgTe is varied and made thicker (this requires the fabrication of separate quantum wells), an interesting phenomenon happens. Due to the inverted band structure of HgTe, BHZ predicted that, at some critical HgTe thickness, a Lifshitz transition occurs in which the system closes the bulk band gap to become a semi-metal, and then re-opens it to become a quantum spin Hall insulator.

In the gap closing and re-opening process, two edge states are brought out from the bulk and cross the bulk-gap. As such, when the Fermi level resides in the bulk gap, the conduction is dominated by the edge channels that cross the gap. The two-terminal conductance is in the quantum spin Hall state and zero in the normal insulating state. As the conduction is dominated by the edge channels, the value of the conductance should be insensitive to how wide the sample is. A magnetic field should destroy the quantum spin Hall state by breaking time-reversal invariance and allowing spin-up spin-down electron scattering processes at the edge. All these predictions have been experimentally verified in an experiment performed in the Molenkamp labs at Universitat Würzburg in Germany. (In fact, a magnetic field in z-direction does not destroy the quantum spin Hall state which has conserved spins. The fact that the quantization of the two-terminal conductance is destroyed by magnetic field suggests that the quantum well is not a quantum spin Hall state, but a topological insulator.)