Experimental study of the valence band of Bi2Se3

The valence band of Bi₂Se₃ is investigated by measuring the Shubnikov-de Haas effect as well as galvanomagnetic and thermoelectric transports. At low hole concentration, the hole Fermi surface is closed and boxlike, but at higher carrier concentrations it develops tubelike extensions that are open, in general agreement with our theoretical calculations. However, the experimentally determined density-of-states effective mass is smaller than density-functional-theory calculations predict; although we cannot give a definitive explanation for this, we suspect that the theory may lack sufficient precision to compute room-temperature transport properties, such as the thermopower, in solids with interlayer van der Waals bonds.