Quantum anomalous Hall phase and effective in-plane Lande-g factor in an inverted InAs/GaSb quantum well

TL;DR

This paper investigates the topological phases in inverted InAs/GaSb quantum wells, calculating the in-plane Lande-g factor, analyzing topological phase transitions with magnetic doping, and predicting parameters for dissipationless charge transport in spintronics.

Contribution

It provides a detailed calculation of the effective in-plane Lande-g factor and explores topological phase transitions induced by magnetic doping in InAs/GaSb quantum wells.

Findings

Robust quantum spin Hall states persist under strong in-plane magnetic fields.

Magnetic doping can induce a transition to the quantum anomalous Hall state.

Predicted controllable parameters for dissipationless charge transport in spintronics.

Abstract

The inverted band structure discovered in InAs/GaSb quantum well (QW) is found to host the topological quantum spin Hall (QSH) states. A QSH insulator hosts counterpropagating spin-polarized edge states that are protected by the time-reversal symmetry. The latest experiment reported a robust quantized Hall conductance arising from these QSH states that persists in an in-plane magnetic field as strong as $12$ Tesla. Based on the result of this experiment, we present here a precise calculation of the effective in-plane Lande-\textit{g} factor. We based our calculations on the tight-binding Hamiltonian projected on a square lattice that reproduces a slightly modified Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang (BHZ) Hamiltonian. We also study the topological phase transitions \textit{w.r.t.} a magnetic doping. At suitable doping, one type of spin states penetrate to the bulk of the QW and the system also enters the Quantum Anomalous Hall (QAH) state. We further confirm this through the calculations of quantum Hall conductance which shows a plateau at $e^2/h$ rather than $2e^2/h$ at such a doping state. The paper predicts a certain range of controllable parameters in an inverted QW for enabling a dissipationless charge transport needed for spintronics application.