Tuning the Conductance of Dirac Fermions on the Surface of a Topological Insulator

Mondal, S and Sen, D and Sengupta, K and Shankar, R (2010) Tuning the Conductance of Dirac Fermions on the Surface of a Topological Insulator. In: Physical Review Letters, 104 (4).

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Abstract

We study the transport properties of the Dirac fermions with a Fermi velocity v(F) on the surface of a topological insulator across a ferromagnetic strip providing an exchange field J over a region of width d. We show that the conductance of such a junction, in the clean limit and at low temperature, changes from oscillatory to a monotonically decreasing function of d beyond a critical J. This leads to the possible realization of a magnetic switch using these junctions. We also study the conductance of these Dirac fermions across a potential barrier of width d and potential V-0 in the presence of such a ferromagnetic strip and show that beyond a critical J, the criteria of conductance maxima changes from chi = eV(0)d/(h) over barv(F) = n pi to chi = (n + 1/2)pi for integer n. We point out that these novel phenomena have no analogs in graphene and suggest experiments which can probe them.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Physical Review Letters
Publisher:	The American Physical Society
Additional Information:	Copyright of this article belongs to The American Physical Society.
Department/Centre:	Division of Physical & Mathematical Sciences > Centre for High Energy Physics
Date Deposited:	12 Mar 2010 07:08
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2010 05:55
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/25783

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