Unraveling the topology of ZrTe${}_5$ by changing temperature

Abstract

We study the effects of temperature on the topological nature of ZrTe${}_5$, which sits near the phase boundary between strong and weak topological insulating orders. Using first-principles calculations, we show that the band gap and the topological indices of ZrTe${}_5$ are extremely sensitive to thermal expansion, and that the electron-phonon interaction accounts for more than a third of the total temperature-dependent effects in ZrTe${}_5$. We find that the temperature dependence of the band gap has an opposite sign in the strong and weak topological insulator phases. Based on this insight, we propose a robust and unambiguous method to determine the topological nature of any given sample of ZrTe${}_5$: if the band gap decreases with temperature it is a strong topological insulator, and if it increases with temperature it is a weak topological insulator. An analogous strategy is expected to be generally applicable to other materials and to become particularly important in the vicinity of topological phase boundaries where other methods provide ambiguous results.

arXiv comment6 pages, 3 figures

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Cited by in corpus (18)

• Solving Complex Nanostructures With Ptychographic Atomic Electron Tomography
• Topological Lifshitz transition and one-dimensional Weyl mode in HfTe5
• Thermodynamically Induced Transport Anomaly in Dilute Metals ZrTe${}_5$ and HfTe${}_5$
• Dark Matter Direct Detection in Materials with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Prediction of Tunable Spin-Orbit Gapped Materials for Dark Matter Detection
• Structural disorder-driven topological phase transition in noncentrosymmetric BiTeI
• Temperature dependence of the energy band gap in ZrTe${}_5$: implications for the topological phase
• Band Structure Driven Thermoelectric Response of Topological Semiconductor ZrTe${}_5$
• Zero-point lattice expansion and band gap renormalization: Grüneisen approach versus free energy minimization
• Optical conductivity and resistivity in a four-band model for ZrTe${}_5$ from ab-initio calculations
• Revealing the topological phase diagram of ZrTe${}_5$ using the complex strain fields of microbubbles
• Engineering a pure Dirac regime in ZrTe${}_5$
• On the effects of strain, defects, and interactions on the topological properties of HfTe5
• Extremely low-energy collective modes in a quasi-one-dimensional system
• Temperature effects in topological insulators of transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers
• Thermal robustness of the quantum spin Hall phase in monolayer WTe${}_2$
• Te Vacancy-Driven Anomalous Transport in ZrTe${}_5$ and HfTe${}_5$
• Nonlinear bulk photocurrent probe Z2 topological phase transition