Chiral topological excitonic insulator in semiconductor quantum wells

Abstract

We present a scheme to realize the chiral topological excitonic insulator in\nsemiconductor heterostructures which can be experimentally fabricated with a\ncoupled quantum well adjacent to twoferromagnetic insulating films. The\ndifferent mean-field chiral topological orders, which are due to the change in\nthe directions of the magnetization of the ferromagnetic films, can be\ncharacterized by the TKNN numbers in the bulk system as well as by the winding\nnumbers of the gapless states in the edged system. Furthermore, we propose an\nexperimental scheme to detect the emergence of the chiral gapless edge state\nand distinguish different chiral topological orders by measuring the thermal\nconductance.\n