Physics Commons^™

Identification Of Photocurrents In Topological Insulators, Derek A. Bas, Rodrigo A. Muniz, Sercan Babakiray, David Lederman, J. E. Sipe, Alan D. Bristow

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Optical injection and detection of charge currents is an alternative to conventional transport and photoemission measurements, avoiding the necessity of invasive contact that may disturb the system being examined. This is a particular concern for analyzing the surface states of topological insulators. In this work one- and two-color sources of photocurrents are isolated and examined in epitaxial thin films of Bi2Se3. We demonstrate that optical excitation and terahertz detection simultaneously captures one- and two-color photocurrent contributions, which has not been required for other material systems. A method is devised to extract the two components, and in doing so each can …