Fractional Topological Insulators of Cooper Pairs Induced by the Proximity Effect

Abstract

Certain insulating materials with strong spin-orbit interaction can conduct currents along their edges or surfaces owing to the nontrivial topological properties of their electronic band structure. This phenomenon is somewhat similar to the integer quantum Hall effect of electrons in strong magnetic fields. Topological insulators analogous to the fractional quantum Hall effect are also possible, but have not yet been observed in any material. Here we show that a quantum well made from a topological band insulator such as Bi2Se3 or Bi2Te3, placed in contact with a superconductor, can be used to realize a two-dimensional topological state with macroscopic many-body quantum entanglement whose excitations carry fractional amounts of an electron's charge and spin. This fractional topological insulator is a "pseudogap" state of induced spinful p-wave Cooper pairs, a new strongly correlated quantum phase with possible applications to spintronic devices and quantum computing.