Electrically tunable spin polarization of chiral edge modes in a quantum anomalous Hall insulator

Abstract

In the quantum anomalous Hall effect, chiral edge modes are expected to conduct spin polarized current without dissipation and thus hold great promise for future electronics and spintronics with low energy consumption. However, spin polarization of chiral edge modes has never been established in experiments. In this work, we theoretically study spin polarization of chiral edge modes in the quantum anomalous Hall effect, based on both the effective model and more realistic tight-binding model constructed from the first principles calculations. We find that spin polarization can be manipulated by tuning either a local gate voltage or the Fermi energy. We also propose to extract spin information of chiral edge modes by contacting the quantum anomalous Hall insulator to a ferromagnetic (FM) lead. The establishment of spin polarization of chiral edge modes, as well as the manipulation and detection in a fully electrical manner, will pave the way to the applications of the quantum anomalous Hall effect in spintronics.

12 pages, 10 figures

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• Quantized Anomalous Hall Effect in Magnetic Topological Insulators
• High-precision realization of robust quantum anomalous Hall state in a hard ferromagnetic topological insulator
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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Colloquium: Quantum anomalous Hall effect
• Above 400 K Robust Perpendicular Ferromagnetic Phase in a Topological Insulator
• Quantum anomalous Hall effect in two-dimensional magnetic insulator heterojunctions
• Induced superconducting correlations in the quantum anomalous Hall insulator
• Two-particle Berry phase mechanism for Dirac and Majorana Kramers pairs of corner modes
• Novel Chern insulators with half-metallic edge states
• Topological spin texture of chiral edge states in photonic two-dimensional quantum walks
• Configuration-Sensitive Transport on Domain Walls of a Magnetic Topological Insulator
• Hinge Spin Polarization in Magnetic Topological Insulators Revealed by Resistance Switch
• Topological field-effect transistor with quantized ON/OFF conductance of helical/chiral dislocation states
• Anomalous Hall effect in the coplanar antiferromagnetic coloring-triangular lattice
• Revisiting magnetic exchange interactions in transition metal doped Bi${}_2$Se${}_3$ using DFT+MFT
• Non-Abelian operation through scattering between chiral Dirac edge modes
• Optimizing proximitized magnetic topological insulator nanoribbons for Majorana bound states
• Giant Spin Transport Anisotropy in Magnetic Topological Insulators