The effect of in-plane magnetic field and applied strain in quantum spin Hall systems: application to InAs/GaSb quantum wells

Abstract

Motivated by the recent discovery of quantized spin Hall effect in InAs/GaSb quantum wells\cite{du2013}$^,$\cite{xu2014}, we theoretically study the effects of in-plane magnetic field and strain effect to the quantization of charge conductance by using Landauer-Butikker formalism. Our theory predicts a robustness of the conductance quantization against the magnetic field up to a very high field of 20 tesla. We use a disordered hopping term to model the strain and show that the strain may help the quantization of the conductance. Relevance to the experiments will be discussed.