Fractional topological insulators of Cooper pairs induced by proximity effect

Abstract

Certain insulating materials with strong spin-orbit coupling can conduct currents along their edges or surfaces. This phenomenon arises from the non-trivial topological properties of the electronic band-structure, and is somewhat similar to the integer quantum Hall effect of electrons in strong magnetic fields. Topological insulators analogous to the fractional quantum Hall effect are also possible, but have not yet been observed in any material. Here we show that a quantum well made from a topological band insulator such as Bi2Se3 or Bi2Te3, placed in contact with a superconductor, can be used to realize a two-dimensional topological state with macroscopic many-body quantum entanglement whose excitations carry fractional amounts of electron's charge and spin. This fractional topological insulator is a "pseudogap" state of induced spinful p-wave Cooper pairs, fundamentally significant to quantum field theory and applicable to spintronic devices and quantum computing.

10 pages, 5 figures; published version with amended supplemental material

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Two-dimensional heavy fermions on the strongly correlated boundaries of Kondo topological insulators
• Quantum field theory of topological spin dynamics
• Topological orders of monopoles and hedgehogs: From electronic and magnetic spin-orbit coupling to quarks
• Vortices and vortex states in Rashba spin-orbit-coupled condensates
• Fibonacci anyon excitations of one-dimensional dipolar lattice bosons
• Effective theory of fractional topological insulators in two spatial dimensions
• Current enhancement through a time dependent constriction in fractional topological insulators
• Vortex states in a non-Abelian magnetic field
• Pfaffian-like ground states for bosonic atoms and molecules in one-dimensional optical lattices
• Tunable zero-energy Dirac and Luttinger nodes in a two-dimensional topological superconductor