Classification of crystalline topological semimetals with an application to Na$_3$Bi

TL;DR

This paper classifies crystalline topological semimetals, focusing on Na$_3$Bi, and analyzes how symmetries protect surface states, providing insights into the stability and gapping of Fermi arcs in these materials.

Contribution

It offers a detailed classification of reflection-symmetry-protected semimetals and applies this framework to Na$_3$Bi, elucidating the symmetry protection of its surface states.

Findings

Na$_3$Bi's Fermi arc is gapped except at time-reversal invariant momenta.

Surface state spectrum is computed considering lattice symmetries.

Symmetry analysis explains the stability of surface states in Dirac semimetals.

Abstract

Topological phases can not only be protected by internal symmetries (e.g., time-reversal symmetry), but also by crystalline symmetries, such as reflection or rotation symmetry. Recently a complete topological classification of reflection symmetric insulators, superconductors, nodal semimetals, and nodal superconductors has been established. In this article, after a brief review of the classification of reflection-symmetry-protected semimetals and nodal superconductors, we discuss an example of a three-dimensional topological Dirac semimetal, which exhibits time-reversal symmetry as well as reflection and rotation symmetries. We compute the surface state spectrum of this Dirac semimetal and identify the crystal lattice symmetries that lead to the protection of the surface states. We discuss the implications of our findings for the stability of the Fermi arc surface states of the Dirac material Na$_3$Bi. Our analysis suggests that the Fermi arc of Na$_3$Bi is gapped except at time-reversal invariant surface momenta, which is in agreement with recent photoemission measurements.