Magnetic order on a topological insulator surface with warping and proximity-induced superconductivity
Abstract
We determine the nature of the magnetic order on the surface of a topological insulator (TI) which develops due to hexagonal warping and the resulting Fermi surface (FS) nesting in the presence of a repulsive Hubbard interaction. For this purpose we investigate the spin susceptibility and derive a Landau theory to compare the different accessible phases. For a nearly hexagonal FS and sufficiently strong interaction the magnetic ground state is formed by a skyrmion lattice, i.e., by a superposition of three helical spin density waves which preserves C symmetry. The magnetic ground state is topologically nontrivial with a nonzero skyrmion charge, which can be stabilized and controlled by an applied magnetic field. By bringing the TI in proximity to a conventional superconductor one can engineer a C-symmetric topological superconductor. We explore the modification of the phase diagram as well as the mutual influence between the skyrmion structure and a multipolar distribution of supercurrents, which can provide information about the underlying skyrmion charge.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1412.7416,
title = {Magnetic order on a topological insulator surface with warping and proximity-induced superconductivity},
author = {Daniel Mendler and Panagiotis Kotetes and Gerd Schön},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.7416},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Main text: 15 pages and 11 figures; Appendix: 4 pages and 2 figures; v2: slight modifications and updated references