| Topological insulators are semiconducting materials that host spin-momentum locked surface Dirac Fermions. These massless surface states occur as a result of a symmetry-protected band crossing. The effective mass of surface electrons can be tuned by breaking that symmetry. Such materials are thus attractive for technological applications as they allow one to manipulate the charge, spin and effective mass of electrons in devices. The surface states are, however, difficult to access and manipulate using conventional electrical probes, as the underlying bulk is not usually insulating.;In this thesis, we have studied electrical transport in two prototypical topological systems, Bi2Te2Se---belonging to the class of Z2 topological insulators, and SnTe---a topological crystalline insulator. We also looked at how the breaking of crystalline symmetry by proximity to a ferromagnet alters the transport in SnTe.;We grew Bi2Te2Se thin films by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on Si(111) and studied the magnetoresistance (MR), which was found to exhibit weak antilocalization (WAL) at low fields and linear MR at high fields. By proposing a model that accounts for both WAL and the linear MR simultaneously, we were able to separate the MR contribution of topological surface-states from that of Rashba spin-orbit split bulk states.;In SnTe thin films, also grown by MBE on BaF2(001) and Si(001), we demonstrated that film crystallinity, morphology, carrier density and mobility all improve with increasing growth temperature. By studying WAL in different films, it was found that valley coupling reduced the measured number of WAL channels. This is a direct consequence of the degenerate surface bands of SnTe. Changes in the shape of the bulk Fermi surface were also seen to influence the measured number of WAL channels.;Proximity-induced magnetism was observed in a SnTe-EuS heterostructure though the anomalous Hall effect. The observation of an isotropic hysteretic MR was shown to be evidence of domain-wall-supported, one-dimensional conduction as previously hypothesized for Bi2Se3-EuS.;As we enter the exciting era of topological condensed matter physics, these results will be important to the development of future device ideas relying on the manipulation of topological surface states. |
