4.8 Article

Transport Theory of Half-Quantized Hall Conductance in a Semimagnetic Topological Insulator

Journal

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS
Volume 129, Issue 9, Pages -

Publisher

AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.129.096601

Keywords

-

Funding

  1. National Key R and D Program of China [2017YFA0303301]
  2. National Basic Research Program of China [2015CB921102]
  3. National Natural Science Foundation of China [11822407, 11921005, 12074108, 12147102, 11704106]
  4. Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities
  5. Chinese Academy of Sciences [XDB28000000]
  6. Beijing Municipal Science & Technology Commission [Z191100007219013]
  7. Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions

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This study systematically investigates the surface transport of a semimagnetic topological insulator and reveals the direct relationship between the half-quantized Hall conductance and the half-quantized chiral current along the edge of a strongly dephasing metal.
Recently, a half-quantized Hall conductance (HQHC) plateau was experimentally observed in a semimagnetic topological insulator heterostructure. However, the heterostructure was metallic with a nonzero longitudinal conductance, which contradicts the common belief that quantized Hall conductance is usually observed in insulators. In this work, we systematically study the surface transport of a semimagnetic topological insulator with both gapped and gapless Dirac surfaces in the presence of dephasing process. In particular, we reveal that the HQHC is directly related to the half-quantized chiral current along the edge of a strongly dephasing metal. The Hall conductance keeps a half-quantized value for large dephasing strengths, while the longitudinal conductance varies with Fermi energies and dephasing strengths. Furthermore, we evaluate both the conductance and resistance as a function of the temperature, which is consistent with the experimental results. Our results not only provide the microscopic transport mechanism of the HQHC, but also are instructive for the probe of the HQHC in future experiments.

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