English

Bulk physics entwined with a topological surface state

Materials Science 2017-03-01 v1 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

For the IV-VI semiconductor family we derive an exact relation between the microscopic gap edge wave functions of the bulk insulator and the Dirac-Weyl topological surface state wave function, thus obtaining a fully microscopic surface state. We find that the balance of spin-orbit interaction and crystal field in the bulk, and the band bending at the surface, can profoundly influence the surface state spin-momentum locking. As a manifestation of this we predict that the spin texture of the MM-point Dirac cones of SnTe can be tuned through an unexpectedly rich sequence of spin textures -- warped helical with winding number ±1\pm 1, kxk_x linear, hyperbolic, and kyk_y linear -- e.g. by tuning the band bending at the surface.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.08784,
  title  = {Bulk physics entwined with a topological surface state},
  author = {N. Klier and S. Sharma and O. Pankratov and S. Shallcross},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.08784},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:30:51.690Z