Layer Construction of Topological Crystalline Insulator LaSbTe
Abstract
Topological crystalline insulator (TCI) is one of the symmetry-protected topological states. Any TCI can be deformed into a simple product state of several decoupled two-dimensional (2D) topologically nontrivial layers in its lattice respecting its crystalline symmetries called the layer construction (LC) limit. In this work, based on first-principles calculations we have revealed that both tetragonal LaSbTe (t-LaSbTe) and orthorhombic LaSbTe (o-LaSbTe) can be interpreted as stacking of 2D topological insulators in each lattice space. The structural phase transition from t-LaSbTe to o-LaSbTe due to soft phonon modes demonstrates how the real space change can lead to the modification of topological states. Their symmetry-based indicators and topological invariants have been analyzed based on LC. We propose that LaSbTe is an ideal example demonstrating the LC paradigm, which bridges the crystal structures in real space to the band topology in momentum space.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1911.09362,
title = {Layer Construction of Topological Crystalline Insulator LaSbTe},
author = {Yuting Qian and Zhiyun Tan and Tan Zhang and Jiacheng Gao and Zhijun Wang and Zhong Fang and Chen Fang and Hongming Weng},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09362},
year = {2020}
}