Engineering relativistic effects in ferroelectric SnTe

Abstract

Spin-orbit coupling is increasingly seen as a rich source of novel phenomena, as shown by the recent excitement around topological insulators and Rashba effects. We here show that the addition of ferroelectric degrees of freedom to a semiconductor featuring topologically-non-trivial properties, such as SnTe, merges the intriguing field of spin-orbit-driven physics with non-volatile functionalities appealing for spintronics. By using a variety of modelling techniques, we show that a strikingly rich sequence of phases can be induced in SnTe, when going from a room-temperature cubic phase to a low-temperature ferroelectric structure, ranging from a topological crystalline insulator to a time-reversal-invariant $Z_2$ topological insulator to a "ferroelectric Rashba semiconductor", exhibiting a huge electrically-controllable Rashba effect in the bulk band structure.

5 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• Topological Crystalline Insulators
• Ferroelectric Rashba Semiconductors as a novel class of multifunctional materials
• Ferroelectric Instability under Screened Coulomb Interactions
• Observation of topological crystalline insulator surface states on (111)-oriented Pb${}_{1-x}$Sn${}_x$Se films
• Spin-polarized (001) surface states of the topological crystalline insulator Pb_{0.73}Sn_{0.27}Se

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