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.

References in corpus (5)

• A system for measuring auto- and cross-correlation of current noise at low temperatures
• Strain Engineering of the Band Gap of HgTe Quantum Wells using Superlattice Virtual Substrates
• Emergent quantum Hall effects below $50$ mT in a two-dimensional topological insulator
• Quantum Hall effect and Landau levels in the 3D topological insulator HgTe
• Bloch-Grüneisen nonlinearity of electron transport in GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructures

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