Designer quantum spin Hall phase transition in molecular graphene

Abstract

Graphene was the first material predicted to be a time-reversal-invariant topological insulator; however, the insulating gap is immeasurably small owing to the weakness of spin-orbit interactions in graphene. A recent experiment [1] demonstrated that designer honeycomb lattices with graphene-like "Dirac" band structures can be engineered by depositing a regular array of carbon monoxide atoms on a metallic substrate. Here, we argue that by growing such designer lattices on metals or semiconductors with strong spin-orbit interactions, one can realize an analog of graphene with strong intrinsic spin-orbit coupling, and hence a highly controllable two-dimensional topological insulator. We estimate the range of substrate parameters for which the topological phase is achievable, and consider the experimental feasibility of some candidate substrates.

5 pages, 3 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topological Phase Transition in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
• Intrinsic and Rashba Spin-orbit Interactions in Graphene Sheets
• Topological Surface States Protected From Backscattering by Chiral Spin Texture
• Spin-orbit gap of graphene: First-principles calculations
• Engineering artificial graphene in a two-dimensional electron gas
• Dirac-point engineering and topological phase transitions in honeycomb optical lattices
• Making Massless Dirac Fermions from Patterned Two-Dimensional Electron Gases

Cited by in corpus (16)

• Colloquium: Topological Band Theory
• Artificial graphene as a tunable Dirac material
• Interacting topological insulators: a review
• Giant topological insulator gap in graphene with 5d adatoms
• Rashba spin orbit coupling in the Kane-Mele-Hubbard model
• Disorder-induced topological phase transitions on Lieb lattices
• Topological crystalline insulator phase in graphene multilayers
• Non-abelian gauge fields and quadratic band touchings in molecular graphene
• Topological Phases in Triangular Lattices of Ru Adsorbed on Graphene: ab-initio calculations
• Tuning the topological insulator states of artificial graphene
• Quantum phase transitions of topological insulators without gap closing
• Charge and spin Hall effect in spin chiral ferromagnetic graphene
• Two-dimensional topological semimetal state in a nanopatterned semiconductor system
• The electronic structure and intervalley coupling of artificial and genuine graphene superlattice
• Magnification of signatures of topological phase transition by quantum zero point motion
• The Effective field theory of 2+1 dimensional topological insulator in the presence of Rashba spin-orbit interaction