Faraday rotation and transmittance as markers of topological phase transitions in 2D materials

Abstract

We analyze the magneto-optical conductivity (and related magnitudes like transmittance and Faraday rotation of the irradiated polarized light) of some elemental two-dimensional Dirac materials of group IV (graphene analogues, buckled honeycomb lattices, like silicene, germanene, stannane, etc.), group V (phosphorene), and zincblende heterostructures (like HgTe/CdTe quantum wells) near the Dirac and gamma points, under out-of-plane magnetic and electric fields, to characterize topological-band insulator phase transitions and their critical points. We provide plots of the Faraday angle and transmittance as a function of the polarized light frequency, for different external electric and magnetic fields, chemical potential, HgTe layer thickness and temperature, to tune the material magneto-optical properties. We have shown that absortance/transmittance acquires extremal values at the critical point, where the Faraday angle changes sign, thus providing fine markers of the topological phase transition. In the case of non-topological materials as phosphorene, a minimum of the transmittance is also observed due to the energy gap closing by an external electric field.

16 pages, 11 figures, including supplemental material with 7 pages and 6 figures, 3 animated gifs. A new paragraph has been included at the Introduction (the fifth one) to establish the new contributions. We have also added a sentence at the end of the abstract for this purpose. The review of previous results has been extended with a new paragragh in the Introduction (the third one)

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Cited by in corpus (1)

• Quantum revivals in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells and topological phase transitions