Piezoelectricity and Topological Quantum Phase Transitions in Two-Dimensional Spin-Orbit Coupled Crystals with Time-Reversal Symmetry

Abstract

Finding new physical responses that signal topological quantum phase transitions is of both theoretical and experimental importance. Here, we demonstrate that the piezoelectric response can change discontinuously across a topological quantum phase transition in two-dimensional time-reversal invariant systems with spin-orbit coupling, thus serving as a direct probe of the transition. We study all gap closing cases for all 7 plane groups that allow non-vanishing piezoelectricity and find that any gap closing with 1 fine-tuning parameter between two gapped states changes either the $Z_2$ invariant or the locally stable valley Chern number. The jump of the piezoelectric response is found to exist for all these transitions, and we propose the HgTe/CdTe quantum well and BaMnSb${}_2$ as two potential experimental platforms. Our work provides a general theoretical framework to classify topological quantum phase transitions and reveals their ubiquitous relation to the piezoelectric response.

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Strong Room-Temperature Bulk Nonlinear Hall Effect in a Spin-Valley Locked Dirac Material
• Spin-valley locking, bulk quantum Hall effect and chiral surface state in a noncentrosymmetric Dirac semimetal BaMnSb${}_2$
• Dynamical Piezomagnetic Effect in Time-Reversal Invariant Weyl Semimetals with Axionic Charge-Density Waves
• Tunable spin-valley coupling in layered polar Dirac metals
• Electronic Structure Examination on the Topological Properties of CaMnSb${}_2$ by Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy
• Polarization jumps by breaking symmetries of two-dimensional Weyl semimetals
• High-field Studies on Layered Magnetic and Polar Dirac Metals
• Pseudo-gauge Fields in Dirac and Weyl Materials
• Unusual Electronic Structure of Dirac Material BaMnSb${}_2$ Revealed by Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectroscopy
• Polarization Jumps across Topological Phase Transitions in Two-dimensional Systems
• Phononic dynamical axion in magnetic Dirac insulators
• Topological invariant and domain connectivity in moiré materials
• Systematic study for two-dimensional $Z_2$ topological phase transitions at high-symmetry points in all layer groups