Magneto-resistance up to 60 Tesla in Topological Insulator Bi2Te3 Thin Films

Los Alamos research on magneto-resistance in thin films is reported in Arxiv.

We report magneto-transport studies of topological insulator Bi2Te3 thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition. A non-saturating linear-like magneto-resistance (MR) is observed at low temperatures in the magnetic field range from a few Tesla up to 60 Tesla. We demonstrate that the strong linear-like MR at high field can be well understood as the weak antilocalization phenomena described by Hikami-Larkin-Nagaoka theory. Our analysis suggests that in our system, a topological insulator, the elastic scattering time can be longer than the spin-orbit scattering time. We briefly discuss our results in the context of Dirac Fermion physics and ‘quantum linear magnetoresistance’.

We observed non-saturating linear-like magnetoreisistance in topological 
insulator Bi2Te3 thin films from a few T up to 60 T at low temperatures. Due to the larger Fermi surface, the magnetic field is not high enough to reach Abrikosov’s quantum limit where all the surface Dirac Fermions are quantized into the lowest Landau level. We demonstrate that the strong linear-like MR at high fields can be well understood as the weak antilocalization phenomena described by Hikami-Larkin-Nagaoka theory. Our analysis suggests that in our topological insulator, the elastic scattering time is longer than the spin-orbit scattering time. The non-saturating linear-like MR observed here up to 60 T suggests many potential applications for topological insulators, including high-field magnetic sensor technology.

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