Dirac mass generation from crystal symmetry breaking on the surfaces of topological crystalline insulators

Zeljkovic, Ilija; Okada, Yoshinori; Serbyn, Maksym; Sankar, R.; Walkup, Daniel; Zhou, Wenwen; Liu, Junwei; Chang, Guoqing; Wang, Yung Jui; Hasan, M. Zahid; Chou, Fangcheng; Lin, Hsin; Bansil, Arun; Fu, Liang; Madhavan, Vidya

doi:10.1038/nmat4215

Title: Dirac mass generation from crystal symmetry breaking on the surfaces of topological crystalline insulators

Journal Article · Mon Feb 16 00:00:00 EST 2015 · Nature Materials

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4215· OSTI ID:1349051

Zeljkovic, Ilija ^[1]; Okada, Yoshinori ^[2]; Serbyn, Maksym ^[3]; Sankar, R. ^[4]; Walkup, Daniel ^[1]; Zhou, Wenwen ^[1]; Liu, Junwei ^[5]; Chang, Guoqing ^[6]; Wang, Yung Jui ^[7]; Hasan, M. Zahid ^[8]; Chou, Fangcheng ^[9]; Lin, Hsin ^[6]; Bansil, Arun ^[7]; Fu, Liang ^[5]; Madhavan, Vidya ^[10]

Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States)
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States); Tohoku Univ., Sendai (Japan)
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
National Taiwan Univ., Taipei (Taiwan); Academia Sinica, Taipei (Taiwan)
Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
National Univ. of Singapore (Singapore)
Northeastern Univ., Boston, MA (United States)
Princeton Univ., Princeton, NJ (United States)
National Taiwan Univ., Taipei (Taiwan)
Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States); Univ. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL (United States)

The tunability of topological surface states and controllable opening of the Dirac gap are of fundamental and practical interest in the field of topological materials. In the newly discovered topological crystalline insulators (TCIs), theory predicts that the Dirac node is protected by a crystalline symmetry and that the surface state electrons can acquire a mass if this symmetry is broken. Recent studies have detected signatures of a spontaneously generated Dirac gap in TCIs; however, the mechanism of mass formation remains elusive. In this work, we present scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) measurements of the TCI Pb_1-xSn_xSe for a wide range of alloy compositions spanning the topological and non-topological regimes. The STM topographies reveal a symmetry-breaking distortion on the surface, which imparts mass to the otherwise massless Dirac electrons—a mechanism analogous to the long sought-after Higgs mechanism in particle physics. Interestingly, the measured Dirac gap decreases on approaching the trivial phase, whereas the magnitude of the distortion remains nearly constant. Our data and calculations reveal that the penetration depth of Dirac surface states controls the magnitude of the Dirac mass. At the limit of the critical composition, the penetration depth is predicted to go to infinity, resulting in zero mass, consistent with our measurements. Lastly, we discover the existence of surface states in the non-topological regime, which have the characteristics of gapped, double-branched Dirac fermions and could be exploited in realizing superconductivity in these materials.

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Research Organization:: Boston College, Chestnut Hill, MA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Basic Energy Sciences (BES)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0008615

OSTI ID:: 1349051

Journal Information:: Nature Materials, Vol. 14, Issue 3; ISSN 1476-1122

Publisher:: Nature Publishing GroupCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 102 works

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