Universal Faraday rotation in HgTe wells with critical thickness

Abstract

The universal value of Faraday rotation angle close to the fine structure constant is experimentally observed in thin HgTe quantum wells with thickness on the border between trivial insulating and the topologically non-trivial Dirac phases. The quantized value of the Faraday angle remains robust in the broad range of magnetic fields and gate voltages. Dynamic Hall conductivity of the hole-like carriers extracted from the analysis of the transmission data shows theoretically predicted universal value of consistent with the doubly degenerate Dirac state. On shifting the Fermi level by the gate voltage the effective sign of the charge carriers changes from positive (holes) to negative (electrons). The electron-like part of the dynamic response does not show quantum plateaus and is well described within the classical Drude model.