Gapped symmetry preserving surface state for the electron topological insulator
Name
Wang-2013-Gapped symmetry preserving.pdf
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461.66 KB
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Author(s)
Wang, Chong
Potter, Andrew C.
Todadri, Senthil
Date Issued
September 2013
Journal
Physical Review B
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Wang, Chong, Andrew C. Potter, and T. Senthil. “Gapped Symmetry Preserving Surface State for the Electron Topological Insulator.” Phys. Rev. B 88, no. 11 (September 2013). © 2013 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
It is well known that the three-dimensional (3D) electronic topological insulator (TI) with charge-conservation and time-reversal symmetry cannot have a trivial insulating surface that preserves symmetry. It is often implicitly assumed that if the TI surface preserves both symmetries then it must be gapless. Here we show that it is possible for the TI surface to be both gapped and symmetry preserving, at the expense of having surface-topological order. In contrast to analogous bosonic topological insulators, this symmetric surface topological order is intrinsically non-Abelian. We show that the surface-topological order provides a complete nonperturbative definition of the electron TI that transcends a free-particle band-structure picture, and could provide a useful perspective for studying strongly correlated topological Mott insulators.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.88.115137
