All-electron topological insulator in InAs double wells

We show that electrons in ordinary III-V semiconductor double wells with an in-plane modulating periodic potential and interwell spin-orbit interaction are tunable topological insulators (TIs). Here the essential TI ingredients, namely, band inversion and the opening of an overall bulk gap in the spectrum arise, respectively, from (i) the combined effect of the double-well even-odd state splitting ΔSAS together with the superlattice potential and (ii) the interband Rashba spin-orbit coupling η. We corroborate our exact diagonalization results with an analytical nearly-free-electron description that allows us to derive an effective Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model. Interestingly, the gate-tunable mass gap M drives a topological phase transition featuring a discontinuous Chern number at ΔSAS∼5.4meV. Finally, we explicitly verify the bulk-edge correspondence by considering a strip configuration and determining not only the bulk bands in the nontopological and topological phases but also the edge states and their Dirac-like spectrum in the topological phase. The edge electronic densities exhibit peculiar spatial oscillations as they decay away into the bulk. For concreteness, we present our results for InAs-based wells with realistic parameters.