Art_20160613_SRep_Nguyen_Narayan_ti-het.pdf (787.31 kB)
Topological states and phase transitions in Sb2Te3-GeTe multilayers
journal contribution
posted on 2016-10-21, 10:29 authored by Thuy-Anh Nguyen, Dirk Backes, Angadjit Singh, Rhodri Mansell, Crispin Barnes, David A. Ritchie, Gregor Mussler, Martin Lanius, Detlev Grutzmacher, Vijay NarayanTopological insulators (TIs) are bulk insulators with exotic ‘topologically protected’ surface conducting modes. It has recently been pointed out that when stacked together, interactions between surface
modes can induce diverse phases including the TI, Dirac semimetal, and Weyl semimetal. However, currently a full experimental understanding of the conditions under which topological modes interact is lacking. Here, working with multilayers of the TI Sb2Te3 and the band insulator GeTe, we provide
experimental evidence of multiple topological modes in a single Sb2Te3-GeTe-Sb2Te3 structure. Furthermore, we show that reducing the thickness of the GeTe layer induces a phase transition from a
Dirac-like phase to a gapped phase. By comparing different multilayer structures we demonstrate that this transition occurs due to the hybridisation of states associated with different TI films. Our results demonstrate that the Sb2Te3-GeTe system offers strong potential towards manipulating topological states as well as towards controlledly inducing various topological phases.
Funding
Leverhulme Trust, EPSRC (UK), DFG-funded priority programme SPP1666.
History
School
- Science
Department
- Physics
Published in
Scientific ReportsVolume
6Pages
27716 - 27716Citation
NGUYEN, T.-A. ... et al, 2016. Topological states and phase transitions in Sb2Te3-GeTe multilayers. Scientific Reports, 6, 27716.Publisher
NatureVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Publisher statement
This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/Acceptance date
2016-05-20Publication date
2016-06-13Copyright date
2016Notes
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Nature under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/eISSN
2045-2322Publisher version
Language
- en