Unusual Conductance Fluctuations and Quantum Oscillation in Mesoscopic Topological Insulator PbBi 4 Te 7

Abstract

We present a detail study of Shubinikov-de-Haas (SdH) oscillations accompanied by conductance fluctuations in a mesoscopic topological insulator PbBi 4 Te 7 device. From SdH oscillations, the evidence of Dirac fermions with π Berry phase is found and the experimentally determined two main Fermi wave vectors are correlated to two surface Dirac cones (buried one inside the other) of layered topological insulator PbBi 4 Te 7 . We have also found evidence of conductance fluctuations, the root mean square amplitude of which is much higher than the usual universal conductance fluctuations observed in nanometer size sample. Calculated autocorrelation functions indicate periodic unique fluctuations may be associated with the topological surface states in the compound.