Berlin 2015 – scientific programme

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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten

DS 11: Transport: Topological Insulators 2 (joint session with DS, HL, MA, O)

DS 11.12: Talk

Tuesday, March 17, 2015, 12:45–13:00, H 3005

Anderson localization at the edge of a 2D topological insulator — •Eslam Khalaf and Pavel Ostrovsky — Max Planck institute for solid state research, Stuttgart, Germany

We study transport via edge modes in a 2D topological insulator. Topological protection prevents complete localization of the edge states; however, quantum interference effects are still relevant for the transport properties at finite length scales. We mainly focus on the two most experimentally relevant cases: (i) a junction between two quantum Hall insulators with different filling factors and hence an imbalance in the number of right- and left-propagating modes (symmetry class A) and (ii) a relatively thick HgTe quantum well in the insulating state with an arbitrary number of edge modes (symmetry class AII). We derive the distribution of transmission probabilities as a function of the distance between leads. This allows us to demonstrate topological effects in the average conductance and the shot noise of the setup. We also consider mesoscopic fluctuations and compute the variance of conductance. This quantity is strongly influenced by topology in the quantum Hall case. All the calculations are carried out assuming localization effects are weak, i.e., in the short length limit. Technically, this amounts to studying 1D non-linear sigma model with a proper topological term and source fields on the semiclassical level. Remarkably, the semiclassical limit of the 1D sigma model can be exactly mapped onto a fully quantum 0D sigma model of a different symmetry class. This allows us to identify the distribution of transmission probabilities with the spectrum of a certain random matrix.