Magnetoconductance in InN/GaN quantum wells in topological insulator phase

¹ Faculty of Physics, University of Warsaw - ul. Pasteura 5, 02-093 Warszawa, Poland
² Institute of High Pressure Physics, “Unipress”, Polish Academy of Sciences - ul. Sokołowska 29/37, 01-142 Warszawa, Poland

Received: 20 January 2017
Accepted: 29 May 2017

Abstract

We present a theoretical study of the magnetic-field effect on the electronic properties of the two-dimensional, hypothetical topological insulator based on the InN/GaN quantum well system. Using the effective two-dimensional Hamiltonian, we have modelled magneto-transport in mesoscopic, symmetric samples of such materials. It turns out that, as in the case of the other two-dimensional topological insulators, the magnetoconductance in such samples is quantized due to the presence of helical edge states for magnetic fields below a certain critical value and for fairly small disorder strength. However, in our case the helical edge transport is much more prone to the disorder than, for example, in the case of topological insulators based on the HgTe/CdTe quantum wells. At low enough level of disorder and for the Fermi energy located in the energy gap of an infinite planar quantum well, we may expect an interesting phenomenon of non-monotonic dependence of the conductance on the magnetic field caused by the complicated interplay of couplings between the heavy hole, light hole and conduction subbands.