Electrodynamics of the quantum anomalous Hall state in a magnetically doped topological insulator

Magnetically doped topological insulators have been extensively studied over the past decade as a material platform to exhibit quantum anomalous Hall effect. Most material realizations are magnetically doped and despite material advances suffer from large disorder effects. In such systems, it is believed that magnetic disorder leads to a spatially varying Dirac mass gap and chemical potential fluctuations, and hence quantized conductance is only observed at very low temperatures. Here, we use a recently developed high-precision time-domain terahertz (THz) polarimeter to study the low-energy electrodynamic response of Cr-doped $({\mathrm{Bi},\mathrm{Sb})}₂{\mathrm{Te}}₃$ thin films. These films have been recently shown to exhibit a dc quantized anomalous Hall response up to the high temperature of $T=2 \mathrm{K}$ at zero gate voltage. In contrast, the real part of the THz range Hall conductance ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_xy(\ensuremath{\omega})$ is slightly smaller than ${e}²/h$ down to $T=2 \mathrm{K}$ with an unconventional decreasing dependence on frequency. The imaginary (dissipative) part of ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_xy(\ensuremath{\omega})$ is small but increasing as a function of frequency. We connect both aspects of our data to a simple model for effective magnetic gap disorder. The extracted distribution of gap values shows rough consistency with those from dc transport, but different than tunneling. This remains to be definitively understood.