Interacting Dirac Fermions on a Topological Insulator in a Magnetic Field

Abstract

We have studied the fractional quantum Hall states on the surface of a topological insulator thin film in an external magnetic field, where the Dirac fermion nature of the charge carriers have been experimentally established only recently. Our studies indicate that the fractional quantum Hall states should indeed be observable in the surface Landau levels of a topological insulator. The strength of the effect will however be different, compared to that in graphene, due to the finite thickness of the topological insulator film and due to the admixture of Landau levels of the two surfaces of the film. At a small film thickness, that mixture results in a strongly non-monotonic dependence of the excitation gap on the film thickness. At a large enough thickness of the film, the excitation gap in the lowest two Landau levels are comparable in strength.

4 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Landau Level Splitting in Graphene in High Magnetic Fields
• Infrared spectroscopy of Landau levels in graphene
• Momentum-Resolved Landau-Level Spectroscopy of Dirac Surface State in Bi2Se3
• The Fractional Quantum Hall States of Dirac Electrons in Graphene
• Magnetic quantum oscillations of the topological insulator surface states

Cited by in corpus (3)

• Relativistic k.p Hamiltonians for centrosymmetric topological insulators from ab initio wave functions
• The Fractional Quantum Hall Effect of Tachyons in a Topological Insulator Junction
• Fractional quantum Hall effect of topological surface states under a strong tilted magnetic field