Department of Physics, University of Illinois, 1110 West Green Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Phys Rev Lett. 2012 Oct 26;109(17):176803. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.109.176803. Epub 2012 Oct 25.
We provide a characterization of tunneling between coupled topological insulators in 2D and 3D under the influence of a ferromagnetic layer. We explore conditions for such systems to exhibit integer quantum Hall physics and localized fractional charge, also taking into account interaction effects for the 2D case. We show that the effects of tunneling are topologically equivalent to a certain deformation or folding of the sample geometry. Our key advance is the realization that the quantum Hall or fractional charge physics can appear in the presence of only a single magnet unlike previous proposals which involve magnetic domain walls on the surface or edges of topological insulators, respectively. We give illustrative topological folding arguments to prove our results and show that for the 2D case our results are robust even in the presence of interactions.
我们提供了在 2D 和 3D 中受铁磁层影响的耦合拓扑绝缘体之间隧穿的特性描述。我们探索了这些系统表现出整数量子霍尔物理和局域分数电荷的条件,同时也考虑了 2D 情况下的相互作用效应。我们表明,隧穿的影响在拓扑上等效于样品几何形状的某种变形或折叠。我们的关键进展是认识到量子霍尔或分数电荷物理可以仅在单个磁体存在的情况下出现,而不像以前的提议那样涉及拓扑绝缘体表面或边缘上的磁畴壁。我们给出了说明性的拓扑折叠论证来证明我们的结果,并表明对于 2D 情况,即使存在相互作用,我们的结果也是稳健的。