Two-dimensional topological insulator edge state backscattering by dephasing

Abstract: To understand the seemingly absent temperature dependence in the conductance of two-dimensional topological insulator edge states, we perform a numerical study which identifies the quantitative influence of the combined effect of dephasing and elastic scattering in charge puddles close to the edges. We show that this mechanism may be responsible for the experimental signatures in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells if the puddles in the samples are large and weakly coupled to the sample edges. We propose experiments on artificial puddles which allow to verify this hypothesis and to extract the real dephasing time scale using our predictions. In addition, we present a new method to include the effect of dephasing in wave-packet-time-evolution algorithms.