Surface States of Topological Insulators

TL;DR

This paper presents an effective bulk model with boundary conditions to analyze surface states of topological insulators, revealing face-dependent properties and tunable Dirac point energies influenced by bulk and surface effects.

Contribution

It introduces a novel bulk-boundary model that captures face-dependent surface state characteristics and provides methods to tune Dirac point energies via surface potentials.

Findings

Dirac point energy depends on bulk p-h symmetry breaking

Surface potentials can tune Dirac point energies while preserving T symmetry

Surface state spin textures vary with crystal face orientation

Abstract

We develop an effective bulk model with a topological boundary condition to study the surface states of topological insulators. We find that the Dirac point energy, the band curvature and the spin texture of surface states are crystal face-dependent. For a given face on a sphere, the Dirac point energy is determined by the bulk physics that breaks p-h symmetry in the surface normal direction and is tunable by surface potentials that preserve T symmetry. Constant energy contours near the Dirac point are ellipses with spin textures that are helical on the S/N pole, collapsed to one dimension on any side face, and tilted out-of-plane otherwise. Our findings identify a route to engineering the Dirac point physics on the surfaces of real materials.