Abstract
A topological insulator state emerges in thin films of a 3D Dirac semimetal, offering a new high-mobility platform for probing and manipulating topological surface states and their phenomena.
Highlights
Gapless boundary states are a key signature of gapped topological phases, such as three-dimensional topological insulators (3D TIs) and quantum spin Hall insulators, which are of great interest for applications ranging from spintronics to quantum computing [1,2,3]
As in the surface states of a 3D TI, this heterojunction should give rise to a half-quantized Hall effect on each surface, and only odd integer filling factors should be observed in the absence of electron-electron interactions and/or a potential difference across the bulk effectively modifies the potential difference as a function of the gate voltage
Besides opening a new direction in the study of 3D topological insulators, based on the realization of highmobility, surface-only transport, this result demonstrates the wide tunability of the 3D Dirac semimetal thin film platform
Summary
Gapless boundary states are a key signature of gapped topological phases, such as three-dimensional topological insulators (3D TIs) and quantum spin Hall insulators, which are of great interest for applications ranging from spintronics to quantum computing [1,2,3]. 3D Dirac semimetals—materials that host doubly degenerate nodes around which the single-particle dispersion can be described by a version of the Dirac equation—have broadened the family of topological materials beyond these gapped phases [4]. Such semimetals host Fermi arcs on surfaces for which the bulk nodes project onto separate points in the surface Brillouin zone, which may form a “Weyl orbit” for quasiparticles, connecting both surfaces through the bulk nodes [5,6,7].
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