Synthesis of Mn-Doped Bi₂Te₃ via Chemical Vapor Deposition

Doping a topological insulator with magnetic elements can produce magnetic ordering within the material, breaking the time-reversal symmetry of the surface electronic states. Without this symmetry, topological insulators can exhibit many exotic quantum phenomena that are of theoretical interest and not well studied, including the quantum anomalous Hall effect, chiral Majorana modes, and topological magnetoelectric effects. In this work, we synthesized Mn-doped Bi₂Te₃, a topological insulator doped with a magnetic element, using atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (CVD) and characterized our samples with optical microscopy, Raman spectroscopy, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The optimal values and acceptable ranges of several CVD growth parameters were determined by systematically varying each parameter one at a time. By utilizing CVD to synthesize Mn-doped Bi₂Te₃, this work demonstrates a simple, scalable, and low-cost process that offers precise control over the stoichiometry of grown crystals and opens the door to the production of high-quality atomically thin crystals–features which make CVD a useful and promising technique for future studies of magnetic topological insulators.