Unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions at the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator

By Takafumi Sato, K. Segawa, K. Kosaka, S. Souma, K. Nakayama, K. Eto, T. Minami, Y. Ando, Takashi Takahashi. 2011

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Time-reversal symmetry makes massless Dirac fermions in topological insulators ‘gapless’. When a gap opens, it breaks this symmetry and confers mass to the fermions. But now a quantum phase transition has been observed in a three-dimensional topological insulator that allows these particles to acquire mass without symmetry breaking.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/211ff96b482d78eaed45ed3ba746452cc43722b9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. N. P. Armitage
3. E. Mele
4. Hsin Lin
5. Arun Bansil
6. M. Zahid Hasan
7. Tanmoy Das
8. Su-Yang Xu

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Ashvin Vishwanath
2. Su-Yang Xu
3. M. Zahid Hasan
4. Hsin Lin
5. G. Bian
6. N. P. Armitage
7. E. Mele
8. R. V. Aguilar

Citations in the corpus

• A sudden collapse in the transport lifetime across the topological phase transition in (Bi1−xInx)2Se3 (2012, methodology): “This, along with the fact that the DC resistance is constant below 30K[8], shows that even in the pure sample transport is dominated by impurity scattering.”
• Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, methodology): “TPTs have been observed experimentally in TlBi(S1-δSeδ)2 (Xu et al. 2011; Sato et al. 2011) as well as in the TCI Pb1-xSnxSe.”
• Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, methodology): “…realizations of a DSM at a quantum critical point occur in normal-topological insulator transitions tuned by composition (Brahlek et al., 2012; Novak et al., 2015; Salehi et al., 2016; Sato et al., 2011; Wu et al., 2013; Xu et al., 2011b; Zeljkovic et al., 2015) and by strain (Young et al., 2011).”
• Angle-resolved photoemission studies of quantum materials (2020, unknown): “Potential explanations given by these groups include the roles of spontaneously broken symmetry (Sato et al., 2011), surface termination (Niu et al., 2012), bulk-surface scattering (Souma et al., 2012), or surface disorder (Pielmeier et al., 2015), though a comprehensive understanding is still…”
• Observation of a three-dimensional topological Dirac semimetal phase in high-mobility Cd3As2 (2013, background): “In both systems, it has been shown that tuning the chemical composition δ can drive the system from a normal insulator state to a topological insulator state [20, 21, 29].”