Conductance of a Helical Edge Liquid Coupled to a Magnetic Impurity

Transport in an ideal two-dimensional quantum spin Hall device is dominated by the counterpropagating edge states of electrons with opposite spins, giving the universal value of the conductance, 2e(2)/h. We study the effect on the conductance of a magnetic impurity, which can backscatter an electron from one edge state to the other. In the case of isotropic Kondo exchange we find that the correction to the electrical conductance caused by such an impurity vanishes in the dc limit, while the thermal conductance does acquire a finite correction due to the spin-flip backscattering.