Experimental evidence and control of the bulk-mediated intersurface coupling in topological insulator Bi2Te2Se nanoribbons

Abstract

Nearly a decade after the discovery of topological insulators (TIs), the important task of identifying and characterizing their topological surface states through electrical transport experiments remains incomplete. The interpretation of these experiments is made difficult by the presence of residual bulk carriers and their coupling to surface states, which is not yet well understood. In this work, we present the first evidence for the existence and control of bulk-surface coupling in Bi2Te2Se nanoribbons, which are promising platforms for future TI-based devices. Our magnetoresistance measurements reveal that the number of coherent channels contributing to quantum interference in the nanoribbons changes abruptly when the film thickness exceeds the bulk phase relaxation length. We interpret this observation as an evidence for bulk-mediated coupling between metallic states located on opposite surfaces. This hypothesis is supported by additional magnetoresistance measurements conducted under a set of gate voltages and in a parallel magnetic field, the latter of which alters the intersurface coupling in a controllable way.

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• Topological insulators and superconductors
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Two-dimensional quantum transport of multivalley (111) surface state in topological crystalline insulator SnTe thin films
• Gate-tunable transport properties of in-situ capped Bi${}_2$Te${}_3$ topological insulator thin films
• Linear magnetoresistance and surface to bulk coupling in topological insulator thin films
• Enhanced transport length of spin-helical Dirac fermions in disordered 3D topological insulators
• Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations in p and n-type topological insulator (Bi${}_x$Sb${}_{1-x}$)${}_2$Te${}_3$
• Topological Phase Transition-Induced Tri-Axial Vector Magnetoresistance in (Bi1-xInx)2Se3 Nanodevices
• Influence of an anomalous temperature-dependence of the phase coherence length on the conductivity of magnetic topological insulators
• Signature of surface state coupling in thin films of the topological Kondo insulator SmB${}_6$ from anisotropic magnetoresistance
• Transport in topological insulators with bulk-surface coupling: Interference corrections and conductance fluctuations
• Evidence of decoupling of surface and bulk states in Dirac semimetal $C{d}_{3}A{s}_2$
• Gate-Tunable Spin-to-Charge Conversion in Topological Insulator-Magnetic Insulator Heterostructures at Room Temperature
• Universal Conductance Fluctuations of Topological Insulators
• Topological delocalization and tuning of surface channel separation in Bi2Se2Te Topological Insulator Thin films
• Surface-bulk coupling in a Bi${}_2$Te${}_3$ nanoplate grown by van der Waals epitaxy
• Weak antilocalization in Cd3As2 thin films