Coupled-layer description of topological crystalline insulators

TL;DR

This paper presents a coupled-layer method to model three-dimensional topological crystalline insulators, enabling tunable surface states and applying it to the SnTe material, advancing understanding of topological surface phenomena.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel coupled-layer framework for describing 3D topological crystalline insulators with reflection symmetry, allowing control over surface state characteristics.

Findings

The coupled-layer approach accurately models SnTe surface states.

Surface Dirac cones can be tuned via layer coupling.

The formalism generalizes to other topological crystalline insulators.

Abstract

We introduce a coupled-layer construction to describe three-dimensional topological crystalline insulators protected by reflection symmetry. Our approach uses stacks of weakly-coupled two-dimensional Chern insulators to produce topological crystalline insulators in one higher dimension, with tunable number and location of surface Dirac cones. As an application of our formalism, we turn to a simplified model of topological crystalline insulator SnTe, showing that its protected surface states can be described using the coupled layer construction.