Universal Role of Combined Symmetry for the Protection of the Dirac Cone in Antiferromagnetic Topological Insulators

TL;DR

This paper investigates how combined symmetries protect the Dirac cone surface states in antiferromagnetic topological insulators, revealing the crucial role of ThetaTD symmetry in maintaining massless Dirac fermions.

Contribution

It demonstrates the universal role of combined symmetry in protecting Dirac cones in AF TIs, supported by experimental evidence from ARPES on GdBi.

Findings

GdBi exhibits massless Dirac fermions regardless of AF domains.

Stripe-type Fermi surface reconstruction observed in GdBi.

ThetaTD symmetry is essential for Dirac-fermion protection.

Abstract

Antiferromagnetic topological insulators (AF TIs) are predicted to exhibit exotic physical properties such as gigantic optical and topological magnetoelectric responses. While a key to achieving such phenomena relies on how to break the symmetry protecting the Dirac-cone surface state (SS) and acquire the mass of Dirac fermions, the mechanism has yet to be clarified. To address this issue, we carried out micro-focused angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy for GdBi hosting the type-II AF order, and uncovered the stripe-type 2$\times$1 reconstruction of the Fermi surface associated with the AF band folding. Intriguingly, in contrast to NdBi with the type-I AF order displaying the surface-selective Dirac-fermion mass, GdBi shows massless behavior irrespective of AF domains due to the robust topological protection. These results strongly suggest a crucial role of the ThetaTD (time-reversal and translational) symmetry to create the Dirac-fermion mass in AF TIs.