Incomplete Protection of the Surface Weyl Cones of the Kondo Insulator SmB$_6$: Spin Exciton Scattering
| Autor: | Kapilevich, G. A., Riseborough, P. S., Gray, A. X., Gulacsi, M., Durakiewicz, Tomasz, Smith, J. L. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1103/PhysRevB.92.085133 |
| Popis: | The compound SmB$_6$ is a Kondo Insulator, where the lowest-energy bulk electronic excitations are spin excitons. It also has surface states that are subjected to strong spin-orbit coupling. It has been suggested that SmB$_6$ is also a topological insulator. Here we show that, despite the absence of time-reversal symmetry breaking and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling, the chiral spin texture of the Weyl cone is not completely protected. In particular, we show that the spin-exciton mediated scattering produces features in the surface electronic spectrum at energies separated from the surface Fermi energy by the spin-exciton energy. Despite the features being far removed from the surface Fermi energy, they are extremely temperature dependent. The temperature variation occurs over a characteristic scale determined by the dispersion of the spin exciton. The structures may be observed by electron spectroscopy at low temperatures. Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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