2015/08/19 by Lingjie Du, Wenkai Lou, Kai Chang +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41467-017-01988-1
published as Nature Communications 8, 1971 (2017). Revised and published with the author list: Lingjie Du, Xinwei Li, Wenkai Lou, Gerard Sullivan, Kai Chang, Junichiro Kono and Rui-Rui Du
arxiv created 2015/08/19 · arxiv updated 2017/12/14
It was proposed that a dilute semimetal is unstable against the formation of an exciton insulator, however experimental confirmations have remained elusive. We investigate the origin of bulk energy gap in inverted InAs/GaSb quantum wells (QWs) which naturally host spatially-separated electrons and holes, using charge-neutral point density (no~po) in gated-device as a tuning parameter. We find two distinct regimes of gap formation, that for I), no >> 5x1010/cm2, a soft gap opens predominately by electron-hole hybridization; and for II), approaching the dilute limit no~ 5x1010/cm2, a hard gap opens leading to a true bulk insulator with quantized edge states. Moreover, the gap is dramatically reduced as the QWs are tuned to less dilute. We further examine the response of gaps to in-plane magnetic fields, and find that for I) the gap closes at B// > ~ 10T, consistent with hybridization while for II) the gap opens continuously for B// as high as 35T. Our analyses show that the hard gap in II) cannot be explained by single-particle hybridization. The data are remarkably consistent with the formation of a nontrivial exciton insulator in very dilute InAs/GaSb QWs.