High-Temperature Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in $n\text{\ensuremath{-}}p$ Codoped Topological Insulators

High-Temperature Quantum Anomalous Hall Effect in $n − p$ Codoped Topological Insulators

Shifei Qi, Zhenhua Qiao, Xinzhou Deng, Ekin D. Cubuk, Hua Chen, Wenguang Zhu, Efthimios Kaxiras, S. B. Zhang, Xiaohong Xu, and Zhenyu Zhang

Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 056804 – Published 27 July 2016

Abstract

The quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE) is a fundamental quantum transport phenomenon that manifests as a quantized transverse conductance in response to a longitudinally applied electric field in the absence of an external magnetic field, and it promises to have immense application potential in future dissipationless quantum electronics. Here, we present a novel kinetic pathway to realize the QAHE at high temperatures by $n − p$ codoping of three-dimensional topological insulators. We provide a proof-of-principle numerical demonstration of this approach using vanadium-iodine (V-I) codoped ${Sb}_{2} {Te}_{3}$ and demonstrate that, strikingly, even at low concentrations of $\sim 2 % V$ and $\sim 1 %$ I, the system exhibits a quantized Hall conductance, the telltale hallmark of QAHE, at temperatures of at least $\sim 50 K$ , which is 3 orders of magnitude higher than the typical temperatures at which it has been realized to date. The underlying physical factor enabling this dramatic improvement is tied to the largely preserved intrinsic band gap of the host system upon compensated $n − p$ codoping. The proposed approach is conceptually general and may shed new light in experimental realization of high-temperature QAHE.

Received 9 July 2015

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.056804

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Anomalous Hall effect Quantum transport Topological insulators

First-principles calculations

Condensed Matter, Materials & Applied Physics

Authors & Affiliations

Shifei Qi^1,2, Zhenhua Qiao^1,3, Xinzhou Deng^1,3, Ekin D. Cubuk⁴, Hua Chen⁵, Wenguang Zhu^1,3, Efthimios Kaxiras⁴, S. B. Zhang⁶, Xiaohong Xu^2,*, and Zhenyu Zhang^1,†

¹International Center for Quantum Design of Functional Materials (ICQD), Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, and Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
²School of Chemistry and Materials Science, Shanxi Normal University, Linfen, Shanxi 041004, China
³CAS Key Laboratory of Strongly-Coupled Quantum Matter Physics, and Department of Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China
⁴School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA
⁵Department of Physics, The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712, USA
⁶Department of Physics, Applied Physics and Astronomy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York 12180-3590, USA