Abstract
We study how the surface states in the strong topological insulator are influenced by finite size effects and compare our results with those recently obtained for two-dimensional topological insulator HgTe. We demonstrate two important distinctions: (i) contrary to HgTe, the surface states in display a remarkable robustness towards decreasing the width down to a few nm thus ensuring that the topological surface states remain intact and (ii) the gapping due to the hybridization of the surface states features an oscillating exponential decay as a function of in in sharp contrast to HgTe. Our findings suggest that is suitable for nanoscale applications in quantum computing or spintronics. Also, we propose a way to experimentally detect both of the predicted effects.
- Received 6 October 2009
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.80.205401
©2009 American Physical Society