Ferromagnetic barrier induced negative differential conductance on the surface of a topological insulator

Abstract

We theoretically investigate the effect of the negative differential conductance of a ferromagnetic barrier on the surface of a topological insulator. Due to the changes of the shape and position of the Fermi surfaces in the ferromagnetic barrier, the transport processes can be divided into three kinds: the total, partial and blockade transmission mechanisms. The bias voltage can give rise to the transition of the transport processes from partial to blockade transmission mechanisms, which results in a giant effect of negative differential conductance. With appropriate structural parameters, the current-voltage characteristics show that the minimum value of the current can reach to zero in a wide range of the bias voltage, and a large peak-to-valley current ratio can be obtained.

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References in corpus (4)

• A topological Dirac insulator in a quantum spin Hall phase : Experimental observation of first strong topological insulator
• Low Bias Negative Differential Resistance in Graphene Nanoribbon Superlattices
• Unusual magnetoresistance in a topological insulator with a single ferromagnetic barrier
• Negative differential resistances with back gate-controlled lowest operation windows in graphene double barrier resonant tunneling diodes