Theory of quasiparticle interference in mirror symmetric 2D systems and its application to surface states of topological crystalline insulators

TL;DR

This paper develops a theoretical framework for understanding quasiparticle interference patterns in 2D systems with mirror and time-reversal symmetries, predicting specific features and their absence in surface states of topological crystalline insulators.

Contribution

It provides a symmetry-based theory for QPI in mirror symmetric 2D systems and applies it to topological crystalline insulator surface states, predicting vanishing peaks in FT-LDOS.

Findings

Certain peaks in FT-LDOS are absent due to mirror eigenvalue differences.

The theory predicts all vanishing peaks in Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_x$Te surface states.

Numerical calculations support the symmetry-based predictions.

Abstract

We study symmetry protected features in the quasiparticle interference (QPI) pattern of 2D systems with mirror symmetries and time-reversal symmetry, around a single static point impurity. We show that, in the Fourier transformed local density of states (FT-LDOS), $\rho(\bq,\omega)$, while the position of high intensity peaks generically depends on the geometric features of the iso-energy contour at energy $\omega$, the \emph{absence} of certain peaks is guaranteed by the opposite mirror eigenvalues of the two Bloch states that are (i) on the mirror symmetric lines in the Brillouin zone (BZ) and (ii) separated by scattering vector $\bq$. We apply the general result to the QPI on the $ <{001} >$-surface of topological crystalline insulator Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_x$Te and predict all vanishing peaks in $\rho(\bq,\omega)$. The model-independent analysis is supported by numerical calculations using an effective four-band model derived from symmetry analysis.