Investigating transverse Hall conductances using two-terminal setups

Abstract

In this paper we present a method to numerically study transverse Hall conductances using a two-terminal setup. Using nonlinear transport concepts we find that the Hall voltage dependence on the model parameters can be investigated from the difference between the injectivities from each terminal. The method is suitable to work with non-equilibrium Green's functions as well as for scattering matrix approaches. We illustrate the proposed idea by studying the quantum spin Hall effect in graphene with disordered spin-orbit scattering centers induced by adatoms. We use two distinct models, a finite difference implementation of the Dirac Hamiltonian and a tight-binding Hamiltonian combined with the scattering matrix approach and the non-equilibrium Green's functions approach, respectively.