The rhombohedral Sb2Se3 is also an intrinsic topological insulator

Abstract

Topological insulators are new class of quantum materials, which have insulating energy gaps in bulk, but exhibit gapless edge states or surface states that are protected by time-reversal symmetry at boundary. It was theoretically predicted and experimentally confirmed that the binary tetradymites Bi2Te3, Bi2Se3, and Sb2Te3 are three-dimensional topological insulators. In this work, we demonstrate by first-principles approach that the ignored Sb2Se3, although with relatively smaller spin-orbital coupling strength, can also exhibit topologically protected surface states with a bulk gap of 0.19 eV, as long as the van der Waals interaction is explicitly included in the calculations. Detailed analysis of the band structures of Sb2Se3 thin films indicates that the non-trivial surface state appears at a critical thickness of six quintuple layers.

References in corpus (7)

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• Quantum Spin Hall Insulator State in HgTe Quantum Wells
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• Topological Insulators with Inversion Symmetry
• First Principles Studies on 3-Dimentional Strong Topological Insulators: Bi2Te3, Bi2Se3 and Sb2Te3
• Sharp Raman Anomalies and Broken Adiabaticity at a Pressure Induced Transition from Band to Topological Insulator in Sb2Se3
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• High-throughput Discovery of Topologically Non-trivial Materials using Spin-orbit Spillage
• Intrinsic spin Hall effect in topological insulators: A first-principles study
• First Principles Modeling of Topological Insulators: Structural Optimization and Exchange Correlation Functionals
• Importance of van der Waals interactions for ab initio studies of topological insulators
• Discovery of highly spin-polarized conducting surface states in the strong spin-orbit coupling semiconductor Sb${}_2$Se${}_3$
• Theoretical study of phase transitions in Sb2S3, Bi2S3 and Sb2Se3 under compression
• Inter-quintuple layer coupling and topological phase transitions in the chalcogenide topological insulators
• Interplay between surface Dirac and Rashba states specific for topologically nontrivial van der Waals superlattices
• Induced robust topological order on an ordinary insulator hetero-structured with a strong topological insulator