Spin accumulation in disordered topological insulator thin films

TL;DR

This paper investigates spin accumulation in disordered topological insulator thin films with in-plane magnetization, revealing how impurity scattering and surface symmetry breaking influence spin responses under an electric field.

Contribution

It introduces a numerical scheme for calculating spin accumulation in TI thin films considering impurity effects and surface coupling, highlighting the role of symmetry breaking.

Findings

Spin accumulation is antisymmetric about the charge neutrality point.

Impurity scattering reduces and can invert spin accumulation.

Surface symmetry breaking is essential for non-zero spin accumulation.

Abstract

Topological insulator (TI) thin films differ from the more commonly studied semi-infinite bulk TIs in that the former possesses both top and bottom surfaces where the surface states localized at different surfaces can couple to one another due to the finite thickness of the film. In the presence of an in-plane mangnetization TI thin films display two distinct phases depending on which of the inter-surface coupling or the magnetization is stronger. In this work, we consider a TI thin film system with an in-plane magnetization and calculate numerically the resulting spin accumulation on both surfaces of the film due to an in-plane electric field to linear order. We describe a numerical scheme for performing the Kubo calculation calculation in which we include impurity scattering and vertex corrections. We find that the sums of the spin accumulation over the two surfaces in the in-plane direction perpendicular to the magnetization, and in the out of plane direction, are antisymmetric in Fermi energy about the charge neutrality point and are non-vanishing only when the symmetry between the top and bottom TI surfaces is broken. The impurity scattering, in general, diminishes the magnitude of the spin accumulation and can also change the sign of the spin accumulation at some Fermi energies where the accumulation is small.