Hydrodynamic theory of surface excitations of three-dimensional topological insulators

Abstract

Edge excitations of a fractional quantum Hall system can be derived as surface excitations of an incompressible quantum droplet using one dimensional chiral bosonization. Here we show that an analogous approach can be developed to characterize surface states of three-dimensional time reversal invariant topological insulators. The key ingredient of our theory is the Luther's multidimensional bosonization construction.

4 pages, published version

References in corpus (5)

• Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
• Three dimensional topological invariants for time reversal invariant Hamiltonians and the three dimensional quantum spin Hall effect
• The Helical Liquid and the Edge of Quantum Spin Hall Systems
• Quantum Spin Hall Effect and Topologically Invariant Chern Numbers
• Robustness of the Spin-Chern number