Signatures of surface states in bismuth at high magnetic fields

Abstract

Electrons in a metal subject to magnetic field commonly exhibit oscillatory behavior as the field strength varies, with a period set by the area of quantized electronic orbits. Recent experiments on elemental bismuth have revealed oscillations for fields above 9 tesla that do not follow this simple dependence and have been interpreted as a signature of electron fractionalization in the bulk. We argue instead that a simple explanation in terms of the surface states of bismuth exists when additional features of the experiment are included. These surface electrons are known to have significant spin-orbit interaction. We show the observed oscillations are in quantitative agreement with the surface theory, which we propose to test by studying the effect of the Zeeman coupling in higher fields, dependence on the field orientation, and the thickness of the samples.

4 pages, 2 figures

References in corpus (5)

• A topological Dirac insulator in a quantum spin Hall phase : Experimental observation of first strong topological insulator
• First direct observation of Spin-textures in Topological Insulators : Spin-resolved ARPES as a probe of topological quantum spin Hall effect and Berry's phase
• Strong spin-orbit splitting on Bi surfaces
• Signatures of Electron Fractionalization in Ultraquantum Bismuth
• Origin of the peaks in the Nernst coefficient of bismuth in strong magnetic fields

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• Evidence of topological two-dimensional metallic surface states in thin bismuth nanoribbons
• Landau spectrum and twin boundaries of bismuth in the extreme quantum limit
• Spontaneous symmetry breaking of magnetostriction in metals with multi-valley band structure
• Measuring the Chern number with quantum oscillations