March 2015

Abstract of the QSIT Lunch Seminar, Thursday, March 5, 2015

A topological insulator on demand

Sina Zeytinoglu, ITP and IQE, ETH Zurich

Topological insulators (TI) are time-reversal invariant insulators which support spin polarised edge currents. The spin polarised edge currents of the TI are recognised as promising candidates for the realisation of many interesting proposals in fields ranging from spintronics to fault-tolerant quantum computation.

In this talk, we present an experimental proposal for the realisation of a TI in a two-dimensional electron gas. A topologically non-trivial band-structure is obtained by inducing a spatially-dependent Rashba potential using nanometer-scale electrodes. We discuss the mechanism behind the appearance of the topologically non-trivial band-structure, as well as the phase diagram of our system. Our calculations show that a topologically non-trivial gap of the order of 1 Kelvin is achievable with realistic experimental parameters.