Signatures of dephasing by mirror-symmetry breaking in weak-antilocalization magnetoresistance across the topological transition in Pb1-x Snx Se

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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä

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2021-06-15

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en

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12

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Physical Review B, Volume 103, issue 24

Abstract

Many conductors, including recently studied Dirac materials, show saturation of coherence length on decreasing temperature. This surprising phenomenon is assigned to external noise, residual magnetic impurities, or two-level systems specific to noncrystalline solids. Here, by considering the SnTe-class of compounds as an example, we show theoretically that breaking of mirror symmetry deteriorates Berry's phase quantization, leading to additional dephasing in weak-antilocalization magnetoresistance (WAL-MR). Our experimental studies of WAL-MR corroborate these theoretical expectations in (111) Pb1-xSnxSe thin film with Sn contents x corresponding to both topological crystalline insulator and topologically trivial phases. In particular, we find the shortening of the phase coherence length in samples with intentionally broken mirror symmetry. Our results indicate that the classification of quantum transport phenomena into universality classes should encompass, in addition to time-reversal and spin-rotation invariances, spatial symmetries in specific systems.

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Funding Information: The International Center for Interfacing Magnetism and Superconductivity with Topological Matter MagTop is supported by the Foundation for Polish Science through the IRA Programme co-financed by EU within SG OP (Grant No. MAB/2017/1). We acknowledge the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin for provision of synchrotron radiation beamtime at UE112 PGM-2a- of BESSY II under the EU CALIPSO Grant No. 312284. W.B. also acknowledges support by Narodowe Centrum Nauki (NCN, National Science Centre, Poland) Project No. 2019/34/E/ST3/00404. G.S. also acknowledges support by Austrian Science Fund, Projects No. P30960-N27 and No. I 4493-N. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 American Physical Society.

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Kazakov, A, Brzezicki, W, Hyart, T, Turowski, B, Polaczyński, J, Adamus, Z, Aleszkiewicz, M, Wojciechowski, T, Domagala, J Z, Caha, O, Varykhalov, A, Springholz, G, Wojtowicz, T, Volobuev, V V & Dietl, T 2021, ' Signatures of dephasing by mirror-symmetry breaking in weak-antilocalization magnetoresistance across the topological transition in Pb1-x Snx Se ', Physical Review B, vol. 103, no. 24, 245307 . https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.103.245307