Zitterbewegung and bulk-edge Landau-Zener tunneling in topological insulators

Abstract

We investigate the ballistic zitterbewegung dynamics and the Landau-Zener tunneling between edge and bulk states of wave packets in two-dimensional topological insulators. In bulk, we use the Ehrenfest theorem to show that an external in-plane electric field not only drifts the packet longitudinally, but also induces a transverse finite side-jump for both trivial and topological regimes. For finite ribbons of width $W$, we show that the Landau-Zener tunneling between bulk and edge states vanishes for large $W$ as their electric field-induced coupling decays with $W^{-3/2}$. This is demonstrated by expanding the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in terms of Houston states. Hence we cannot picture the quantum spin Hall states as arising from the zitterbewegung bulk trajectories `leaking' into the edge states, as proposed in Phys. Rev. B 87, 161115 (2013).

arXiv comment7 pages, 5 figures

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• Valley-driven Zitterbewegung in Kekulé-distorted graphene
• Topological insulator spin transistor
• Steering Zitterbewegung in driven Dirac systems -- from persistent modes to echoes
• Electric field effect on electron gas spins in two-dimensional magnets with strong spin-orbit coupling
• Zitterbewegung-mediated RKKY coupling in topological insulator thin films
• A semiclassical approach to surface Fermi arcs in Weyl semimetals
• Anomalous Bloch oscillation and electrical switching of edge magnetization in bilayer graphene nanoribbon
• Link of the Zitterbewegung with the spin conductivity and the spin-textures of multiband systems