Wallpaper fermions and the nonsymmorphic Dirac insulator

Sunday, July 22, 2018 - 23:51 in Physics & Chemistry

Materials whose gapless surface states are protected by crystal symmetries include mirror topological crystalline insulators and nonsymmorphic hourglass insulators. There exists only a very limited set of possible surface crystal symmetries, captured by the 17 "wallpaper groups." Here we show that a consideration of symmetry-allowed band degeneracies in the wallpaper groups can be used to understand previously described topological crystalline insulators and to predict phenomenologically distinct examples. In particular, the two wallpaper groups with multiple glide lines, pgg and p4g, allow for a topological insulating phase whose surface spectrum consists of only a single, fourfold-degenerate, true Dirac fermion, representing an exception to a symmetry-enhanced fermion-doubling theorem. We theoretically predict the presence of this phase in Sr2Pb3 in space group 127 (P4/mbm).

Read the whole article on

More from

Latest Science Newsletter

Get the latest and most popular science news articles of the week in your Inbox! It's free!

Check out our next project, Biology.Net