Electron-hole scattering limited transport of Dirac fermions in a topological insulator

Abstract

We experimentally investigate the effect of electron temperature on transport in the two-dimensional Dirac surface states of the three-dimensional topological insulator HgTe. We find that around the minimal conductivity point, where both electrons and holes are present, heating the carriers with a DC current results in a non-monotonic differential resistance of narrow channels. We show that the observed initial increase in resistance can be attributed to electron-hole scattering, while the decrease follows naturally from the change in Fermi energy of the charge carriers. Both effects are governed dominantly by a van Hove singularity in the bulk valence band. The results demonstrate the importance of interband electron-hole scattering in the transport properties of topological insulators.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• Interlayer electron-hole friction in tunable twisted bilayer graphene semimetal
• kdotpy: $\mathbf{k}\cdot \mathbf{p}$ theory on a lattice for simulating semiconductor band structures
• Universal transparency and fine band structure near the Dirac point in HgTe quantum wells
• Thermoelectric transport in a three-dimensional HgTe topological insulator