Interplay of quantum spin Hall effect and spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking in electron-hole bilayers I: Transport properties

Abstract

The band-inverted electron-hole bilayers, such as InAs/GaSb, are an interesting playground for the interplay of quantum spin Hall effect and correlation effects because of the small density of electrons and holes and the relatively small hybridization between the electron and hole bands. It has been proposed that Coulomb interactions lead to a time-reversal symmetry broken phase when the electron and hole densities are tuned from the trivial to the quantum spin Hall insulator regime. We show that the transport properties of the system in the time-reversal symmetry broken phase are consistent with the recent experimental observations in InAs/GaSb. Moreover, we carry out a quantum transport study on a Corbino disc where the bulk and edge contributions to the conductance can be separated. We show that the edge becomes smoothly conducting and the bulk is always insulating when one tunes the system from the trivial to the quantum spin Hall insulator phase, providing unambiguous transport signatures of the time-reversal symmetry broken phase.

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Breakdown of helical edge state topologically protected conductance in time-reversal-breaking excitonic insulators
• Fast electrically switchable large gap quantum spin Hall states in MGe${}_2$Z${}_4$
• Field-free Josephson diode effect in interacting chiral quantum dot junctions
• Unprotected edge modes in quantum spin Hall insulator candidate materials
• Magneto-Induced Topological Phase Transition in Inverted InAs/GaSb Bilayers