Fragility of Nonlocal Edge-Mode Transport in the Quantum Spin Hall State

Nonlocal currents and voltages are better at withstanding the deleterious effects of dephasing than local currents and voltages in nanoscale systems. This hypothesis is known to be true in quantum Hall setups. We test this hypothesis in a four-terminal quantum spin Hall setup wherein we compare the local resistance measurement with the nonlocal one. In addition to inelastic-scattering-induced dephasing, we also test the resilience of the resistance measurements in the aforesaid setups to disorder and spin-flip scattering. We find the axiom that nonlocal resistance is less affected by the detrimental effects of disorder and dephasing to be untrue, in general, for the quantum spin Hall case. This has important consequences since it is widely communicated that nonlocal transport through edge channels in topological insulators have potential applications in low-power information processing.