Kondo holes in topological Kondo insulators: Spectral properties and surface quasiparticle interference

Abstract

A fascinating type of symmetry-protected topological states of matter are topological Kondo insulators, where insulating behavior arises from Kondo screening of localized moments via conduction electrons, and non-trivial topology emerges from the structure of the hybridization between the local-moment and conduction bands. Here we study the physics of Kondo holes, i.e., missing local moments, in three-dimensional topological Kondo insulators, using a self-consistent real-space mean-field theory. Such Kondo holes quite generically induce in-gap states which, for Kondo holes at or near the surface, hybridize with the topological surface state. In particular, we study the surface-state quasiparticle interference (QPI) induced by a dilute concentration of surface Kondo holes and compare this to QPI from conventional potential scatterers. We treat both strong and weak topological-insulator phases and, for the latter, specifically discuss the contributions to QPI from inter-Dirac-cone scattering.

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Cited by in corpus (14)

• Interacting topological insulators: a review
• Scanning tunneling spectroscopy and surface quasiparticle interference in models for the strongly correlated topological insulators SmB6 and PuB6
• Distinct topological crystalline phases in models for the strongly correlated topological insulator SmB6
• Two-dimensional heavy fermions on the strongly correlated boundaries of Kondo topological insulators
• Spin textures on general surfaces of the correlated topological insulator SmB6
• Strongly correlated multi-impurity models: The crossover from a single-impurity problem to lattice models
• Fragility of the Kondo insulating gap against disorder: relevance to recent puzzles in topological Kondo insulators
• Universal properties of the near-gap spectra of SmB6: dynamical mean-field calculations and photoemission experiments
• Robust surface states and coherence phenomena in magnetically alloyed SmB6
• Non-universal weak antilocalization effect in cubic topological Kondo insulators
• Hybridization oscillation in the one-dimensional Kondo-Heisenberg model with Kondo holes
• Kondo holes in strongly correlated impurity arrays: RKKY driven Kondo screening and hole-hole interactions
• Surface reconstruction in a tight-binding model for the topological Kondo insulator SmB6
• Mapping out the emergence of topological features in the highly alloyed topological Kondo insulators Sm${}_{1-x}{M}_x$B${}_6$ ($M$=Eu, Ce)