Dynamics of a Rydberg hydrogen atom near a topologically insulating surface

Abstract

We investigate the classical dynamics of a Rydberg hydrogen atom near the surface of a planar topological insulator. The system is described by a Hamiltonian consisting of the free-hydrogen part and the hydrogen-surface potential. The latter includes the interactions between the electron and both image electric charges and image magnetic monopoles. Owing to the axial symmetry, the $z$ component of angular momentum $l_z$ is conserved. Here we consider the $l_z=0$ case. The structure of the phase space is explored extensively by means of numerical techniques and Poincaré surfaces of section for the recently discovered topological insulator TlBiSe${}_2$. The phase space of the system is separated into regions of vibrational and rotational motion. We show that vibrational-rotational-vibrational type transitions can be tuned with the topological magnetoelectric polarizability.

Accepted for publication in Europhysics Letters

References in corpus (5)

• Tunable Casimir repulsion with three dimensional topological insulators
• Electric-Magnetic Duality and Topological Insulators
• Effect of finite temperature and uniaxial anisotropy on the Casimir effect with three-dimensional topological insulators
• Relativistic analysis of magnetoelectric crystals: extracting a new 4-dimensional P odd and T odd pseudoscalar from Cr_2 O_3 data
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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Optical response of a topological-insulator--quantum-dot hybrid interacting with a probe electric field
• Exact solution of the Schrödinger equation for an hydrogen atom at the interface between the vacuum and a topologically insulating surface
• The magnetoelectric effect due to a semispherical capacitor surrounded by a spherical topologically insulating shell