Symmetry breaking, strain solitons and mechanical edge modes in monolayer antimony

TL;DR

This paper develops a continuum model for buckling and domain wall solitons in monolayer antimony, revealing it as a mechanical topological insulator with edge modes similar to electronic topological insulators.

Contribution

It introduces a topological classification of mechanical edge modes in monolayer antimony based on a continuum buckling model and Dirac equation mapping.

Findings

Identification of gapless edge modes propagating along domain walls

Mapping of the continuum model to a topological Dirac equation in class BDI

Prediction of observable effects via standard experimental techniques

Abstract

Two-dimensional materials exhibit a variety of mechanical instabilities accompanied by spontaneous symmetry breaking. Here we develop a continuum description of the buckling instability of antimonene sheets. Regions of oppositely directed buckling constitute domains separated by domain walls that are solitons in our model. Perturbations about equilibrium propagate as waves with a gapped dispersion in the bulk but there is a gapless mode with linear dispersion that propagates along the domain walls in a manner reminiscent of the electronic modes of topological insulators. We establish that monolayer antimonene is a mechanical topological insulator by demonstrating a mapping between our continuum model and an underlying Dirac equation of the symmetry class BDI which is known to be a topological insulator in one dimension and a weak topological insulator in two dimensions. Monolayer antimony can be produced by exfoliation as well as epitaxy and the effects predicted in this paper should be accessible to standard experimental tools such as scanning probe microscopy and Raman spectroscopy. We surmise that the effects studied here (namely low scale symmetry breaking, strain solitons and gapless edge modes) are not limited to antimonene but are common features of two dimensional materials.