Low-temperature surface conduction in the Kondo insulator SmB<mml:mrow/>6

2012/11/30 by Steven Wolgast, Çağlıyan Kurdak, Cagliyan Kurdak +5 · 17 citations
Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Composite material #Condensed matter physics #Geometry #Insulator (electricity) #Materials science #Mathematics #Physics #Rare-earth and actinide compounds #Surface (topology) #Thermal conduction #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.mtrl-sci #cond-mat.str-el

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.88.180405

published as Phys. Rev. B 88, 180405(R) (2013) · 23 pages, 8 figures. We updated minor editorial changes and references to match the published version

openalex publication_date 2013/11/27 · arxiv created 2013/12/02 · arxiv updated 2013/12/03 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

We study the transport properties of the Kondo insulator SmB₆ with a specialized configuration designed to distinguish bulk-dominated conduction from surface-dominated conduction. We find that as the material is cooled below 4 K, it exhibits a crossover from bulk to surface conduction with a fully insulating bulk. We take the robustness and magnitude of the surface conductivity, as is manifest in the literature of SmB₆, to be strong evidence for the topological insulator metallic surface states recently predicted for this material.

Citations

• Topological phases and the quantum spin Hall effect in three dimensions
• Topological insulators and superconductors
• Quantum Spin Hall Effect in Graphene
• Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
• The birth of topological insulators
• Topological Insulators

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• Introduction to Many-Body Physics
• Surface-dominated conduction up to 240 K in the Kondo insulator SmB6 under strain
• Incomplete protection of the surface Weyl cones of the Kondo insulatorSmB6: Spin exciton scattering
• Additional energy scale in SmB6 at low-temperature
• Electrical detection of the inverse Edelstein effect on the surface of SmB6
• Influence of helical spin structure on the magnetoresistance of an ideal topological insulator
• Evidence for Weyl fermions in a canonical heavy-fermion semimetal YbPtBi
• Radio Frequency Tunable Oscillator Device Based on aSmB6Microcrystal
• Probing the interplay between surface and bulk states in the topological Kondo insulatorSmB6through conductance fluctuation spectroscopy