Topological crystalline insulators in the SnTe material class

By Timothy H. Hsieh, Hsin Lin, Junwei Liu, Wenhui Duan, Arun Bansil, Liang Fu. Nature Communications, 2012

1,207 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Topological crystalline insulators are new states of matter in which the topological nature of electronic structures arises from crystal symmetries. Here we predict the first material realization of topological crystalline insulator in the semiconductor SnTe by identifying its non-zero topological index. We predict that as a manifestation of this non-trivial topology, SnTe has metallic surface states with an even number of Dirac cones on high-symmetry crystal surfaces such as {001}, {110} and {111}. These surface states form a new type of high-mobility chiral electron gas, which is robust against disorder and topologically protected by reflection symmetry of the crystal with respect to {110} mirror plane. Breaking this mirror symmetry via elastic strain engineering or applying an in-plane magnetic field can open up a continuously tunable band gap on the surface, which may lead to wide-ranging applications in thermoelectrics, infra-red detection and tunable electronics. Closely related semiconductors PbTe and PbSe also become topological crystalline insulators after band inversion by pressure, strain and alloying. Topologically protected states of matter are receiving widespread attention owing to their unusual electronic properties. Using numerical simulations, this study predicts that tin telluride is a physical realization of a new class of materials termed topological crystalline insulators.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8d4efc8d64d0094b48094ffc21f683682d877da9

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. D. Vanderbilt
3. Y. Ando
4. Hsin Lin
5. Arun Bansil
6. Tanmoy Das
7. Z. Fang
8. H. Weng

In Condensed Matter Physics

1. Y. Ando
2. Masatoshi Sato
3. Chen Fang
4. X. Dai
5. H. Weng
6. Z. Fang
7. Hsin Lin
8. Arun Bansil

In Materials Chemistry

1. Hsin Lin
2. Arun Bansil
3. Y. Ando
4. Tanmoy Das
5. Ashvin Vishwanath
6. D. Vanderbilt
7. Chen Fang
8. Z. Fang

Citations in the corpus

• Topological insulators, topological superconductors and Weyl fermion semimetals: discoveries, perspectives and outlooks (2015, background): “candidate, Pb x 1− SnxTe(Se), was quickly identified by firstprinciples band structure calculations [113].”
• Weyl Semimetal Phase in Noncentrosymmetric Transition-Metal Monophosphides (2014, background): “However, the appearance of Weyl points can still be inferred by analyzing the mirror Chern numbers (MCN) [29,30] and Z2 indices [26,31] for the four mirror and time-reversal invariant planes in the BZ.”
• Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, methodology): “Littlewood, P. B., B. Mihaila, R. K. Schulze, D. J. Safarik, J. E. Gubernatis, A. Bostwick, E. Rotenberg, et al., 2010, “Band Structure of SnTe Studied by Photoemission Spectroscopy,” Phys.”