Quantum spin Hall effect

Description

The first proposal for the existence of a quantum spin Hall state was developed by Charles Kane and Gene Mele who adapted an earlier model for graphene by F. Duncan M. Haldane which exhibits an integer quantum Hall effect. The Kane and Mele model is two copies of the Haldane model such that the spin up electron exhibits a chiral integer quantum Hall Effect while the spin down electron exhibits an anti-chiral integer quantum Hall effect. A relativistic version of the quantum spin Hall effect was introduced in the 1990s for the numerical simulation of chiral gauge theories; the simplest example consisting of a parity and time reversal symmetric U(1) gauge theory with bulk fermions of opposite sign mass, a massless Dirac surface mode, and bulk currents that carry chirality but not charge (the spin Hall current analogue). Overall the Kane-Mele model has a charge-Hall conductance of exactly zero but a spin-Hall conductance of exactly ${\displaystyle {\sigma }_{xy}^{\text{spin}}=2}$ (in units of ${\displaystyle \frac{e}{4\pi }}$). Independently, a quantum spin Hall model was proposed by Andrei Bernevig and Shoucheng Zhang in an intricate strain architecture which engineers, due to spin-orbit coupling, a magnetic field pointing upwards for spin-up electrons and a magnetic field pointing downwards for spin-down electrons. The main ingredient is the existence of spin–orbit coupling, which can be understood as a momentum-dependent magnetic field coupling to the spin of the electron.

Real experimental systems, however, are far from the idealized picture presented above in which spin-up and spin-down electrons are not coupled. A very important achievement was the realization that the quantum spin Hall state remains to be non-trivial even after the introduction of spin-up spin-down scattering, which destroys the quantum spin Hall effect. In a separate paper, Kane and Mele introduced a topological ${\displaystyle {\mathbb{Z}}_2}$ invariant which characterizes a state as trivial or non-trivial band insulator (regardless if the state exhibits or does not exhibit a quantum spin Hall effect). Further stability studies of the edge liquid through which conduction takes place in the quantum spin Hall state proved, both analytically and numerically that the non-trivial state is robust to both interactions and extra spin-orbit coupling terms that mix spin-up and spin-down electrons. Such a non-trivial state (exhibiting or not exhibiting a quantum spin Hall effect) is called a topological insulator, which is an example of symmetry-protected topological order protected by charge conservation symmetry and time reversal symmetry. (Note that the quantum spin Hall state is also a symmetry-protected topological state protected by charge conservation symmetry and spin-${\displaystyle S_z}$ conservation symmetry. We do not need time reversal symmetry to protect quantum spin Hall state. Topological insulator and quantum spin Hall state are different symmetry-protected topological states. So topological insulator and quantum spin Hall state are different states of matter.)