Electron-Hole Scattering Limited Transport of Dirac Fermions in a Topological Insulator.

We have experimentally investigated the effect of electron temperature on transport in the two-dimensional Dirac surface states of the three-dimensional topological insulator HgTe. We have found that around the minimal conductivity point, where both electrons and holes are present, heating the carriers with a DC current results in a nonmonotonic differential resistance of narrow channels. We have shown 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.

Semiclassical Conservation of Spin and Large Transverse Spin Current in Dirac Systems.

In Dirac materials, the low-energy excitations obey the relativistic Dirac equation. This dependence implies that electrons are exposed to strong spin-orbit coupling. Hence, real spin conservation is believed to be violated in Dirac materials. We show that this point of view needs to be refined in the semiclassical picture which applies to the case of doped Dirac materials (away from the nodal point in the spectrum). We derive a novel type of Boltzmann equation for these systems if they are brought slightly out of equilibrium. Remarkably, spin-momentum locking is softened and a generalized spin conservation law can be formulated. The most striking observable consequence of our theory is a large transverse spin current in a nearly ballistic transport regime.

Topological Kondo effect in transport through a superconducting wire with multiple Majorana end states.

We investigate a system of multiple Majorana states at the end of a topological superconducting wire coupled to a normal lead. For a minimum of three Majorana fermions at the interface, we find nontrivial renormalization physics. Interface tunneling processes can be classified in terms of spin-1/2 and spin-3/2 irreducible representations of the SU(2) group. We show that the renormalization of the tunneling amplitudes belonging to different representations is completely different in that one type is suppressed, whereas the other is enhanced, depending on the sign of the Kondo-type interaction coupling. This results in distinct temperature dependencies of the tunneling current through the interface and different spin polarizations of this current.

Influence of Impurity Spin Dynamics on Quantum Transport in Epitaxial Graphene.

Experimental evidence from both spin-valve and quantum transport measurements points towards unexpectedly fast spin relaxation in graphene. We report magnetotransport studies of epitaxial graphene on SiC in a vector magnetic field showing that spin relaxation, detected using weak-localization analysis, is suppressed by an in-plane magnetic field B(∥), and thereby proving that it is caused at least in part by spinful scatterers. A nonmonotonic dependence of the effective decoherence rate on B(∥) reveals the intricate role of the scatterers' spin dynamics in forming the interference correction to the conductivity, an effect that has gone unnoticed in earlier weak localization studies.