2011/03/28 by Yan-Yang Zhang, Xiang-Rong Wang, X. C. Xie +1
Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Chemical and Physical Properties of Materials #Conductance #Dirac (video compression format) #Excitation #Magnetic field #Quantum Hall effect #Quantum and electron transport phenomena #Scattering #Surface states #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological insulator #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/0953-8984/24/1/015004
published as J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 24 015004 (2012)
arxiv created 2011/03/28 · openalex publication_date 2011/12/02 · arxiv updated 2012/01/16 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Low energy excitation of surface states of a three-dimensional topological insulator (3DTI) can be described by Dirac fermions. By using a tight-binding model, the transport properties of the surface states in a uniform magnetic field are investigated. It is found that chiral surface states parallel to the magnetic field are responsible for the quantized Hall (QH) conductance (2n + 1)e²/h multiplied by the number of Dirac cones. Due to the two-dimensional nature of the surface states, the robustness of the QH conductance against impurity scattering is determined by the oddness and evenness of the Dirac cone number. An experimental setup for transport measurement is proposed.