Contributor info: Prof. Octavio Castaños

Alberto Mayorgas, Manuel Calixto, Nicolás A. Cordero, Elvira Romera, Octavio Héctor Castaños Garza

SciPost Phys. Core 7, 029 (2024) · published 13 May 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The time evolution of a wave packet is a tool to detect topological phase transitions in two-dimensional Dirac materials, such as graphene and silicene. Here we extend the analysis to HgTe/CdTe quantum wells and study the evolution of their electron current wave packet, using 2D effective Dirac Hamiltonians and different layer thicknesses. We show that the two different periodicities that appear in this temporal evolution reach a minimum near the critical thickness, where the system goes from normal to inverted regime. Moreover, the maximum of the electron current amplitude changes with the layer thickness, identifying that current maxima reach their higher value at the critical thickness. Thus, we can characterize the topological phase transitions in terms of the periodicity and amplitude of the electron currents.

Manuel Calixto, Alberto Mayorgas, Nicolás A. Cordero, Elvira Romera, Octavio Héctor Castaños Garza

SciPost Phys. 16, 077 (2024) · published 18 March 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We analyze the magneto-optical conductivity (and related magnitudes like transmittance and Faraday rotation of the irradiated polarized light) of some elemental two-dimensional Dirac materials of group IV (graphene analogues, buckled honeycomb lattices, like silicene, germanene, stannane, etc.), group V (phosphorene), and zincblende heterostructures (like HgTe/CdTe quantum wells) near the Dirac and gamma points, under out-of-plane magnetic and electric fields, to characterize topological-band insulator phase transitions and their critical points. We provide plots of the Faraday angle and transmittance as a function of the polarized light frequency, for different external electric and magnetic fields, chemical potential, HgTe layer thickness and temperature, to tune the material magneto-optical properties. We have shown that absortance/transmittance acquires extremal values at the critical point, where the Faraday angle changes sign, thus providing fine markers of the topological phase transition. In the case of non-topological materials as phosphorene, a minimum of the transmittance is also observed due to the energy gap closing by an external electric field.

Eduardo Nahmad-Achar, Ramón López-Peña, Sergio Cordero, Octavio Castaños Garza

SciPost Phys. Proc. 14, 039 (2023) · published 24 November 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We show that the behaviour in phase space of the Wigner function associated to the electromagnetic modes carries the information of both, the entanglement properties between matter and field, and the regions in parameter space where quantum phase transitions take place. A finer classification for the continuous phase transitions is obtained through the computation of the surface of minimum fidelity.