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Observation of a smoothly tunable Dirac point in Ge(BixSb1x)2Te4

Sean Howard1, Arjun Raghavan1, Davide Iaia1, Caizhi Xu1, David Flötotto1, Man-Hong Wong1, Sung-Kwan Mo2, Bahadur Singh3, Raman Sankar4 et al.

Hsin Lin4, Tai-Chang Chiang1, and Vidya Madhavan1,*

  • 1Department of Physics and Frederick Seitz Materials Research Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, USA
  • 2Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA
  • 3Department of Condensed Matter Physics and Materials Science, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai 400005, India
  • 4Institute of Physics, Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan 11529

  • *vm1@illinois.edu

Phys. Rev. Materials 6, 044201 – Published 25 April, 2022

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevMaterials.6.044201

Abstract

State-of-the-art topological devices require the use of topologically protected surface states to drive electronic transport. In this paper, we examine a tunable topological system, Ge(BixSb1x)2Te4, for a range of x values from 0 to 1, using a combination of Fourier transform scanning tunneling spectroscopy and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Our results show that the Dirac point shifts linearly with x, crossing the Fermi energy near x=0.7. This observation of a smoothly tunable, isolated Dirac point crossing through the topological transport regime and having strong linear dependence with substitution can be critical for future topological spintronics applications.

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