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.

References in corpus (13)

• Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
• Discovery (theoretical prediction and experimental observation) of a large-gap topological-insulator class with spin-polarized single-Dirac-cone on the surface
• Topological Field Theory of Time-Reversal Invariant Insulators
• Topological Surface States Protected From Backscattering by Chiral Spin Texture
• Fractionalized Fermi liquids
• Correlated Topological Insulators with Mixed Valence
• Electron Cotunneling into a Kondo Lattice
• Effect of a single impurity on the local density of states in monolayer and bilayer graphene
• The fate of topological-insulator surface states under strong disorder
• Kondo effect on the surface of 3D topological insulators: Signatures in scanning tunneling spectroscopy
• Stationary phase approximation approach to the quasiparticle interference on the surface of a strong topological insulator
• Probing surface states of topological insulator: Kondo effect and Friedel oscillation under magnetic field
• Strongly Inhomogeneous Phases and Non-Fermi Liquid Behavior in Randomly Depleted Kondo Lattices

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Scanning tunneling spectroscopy and surface quasiparticle interference in models for the strongly correlated topological insulators SmB6 and PuB6
• Two-dimensional heavy fermions on the strongly correlated boundaries of Kondo topological insulators
• Strongly correlated multi-impurity models: The crossover from a single-impurity problem to lattice models
• Kondo holes in strongly correlated impurity arrays: RKKY driven Kondo screening and hole-hole interactions
• Mapping out the emergence of topological features in the highly alloyed topological Kondo insulators Sm${}_{1-x}{M}_x$B${}_6$ ($M$=Eu, Ce)