Unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions at the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator

Time-reversal symmetry makes massless Dirac fermions in topological insulators ‘gapless’. When a gap opens, it breaks this symmetry and confers mass to the fermions. But now a quantum phase transition has been observed in a three-dimensional topological insulator that allows these particles to acquire mass without symmetry breaking. The three-dimensional (3D) topological insulator is a novel quantum state of matter where an insulating bulk hosts a linearly dispersing surface state, which can be viewed as a sea of massless Dirac fermions protected by the time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Breaking the TRS by a magnetic order leads to the opening of a gap in the surface state 1 , and consequently the Dirac fermions become massive. It has been proposed theoretically that such a mass acquisition is necessary to realize novel topological phenomena 2 , 3 , but achieving a sufficiently large mass is an experimental challenge. Here we report an unexpected discovery that the surface Dirac fermions in a solid-solution system TlBi(S 1− x Se x ) 2 acquire a mass without explicitly breaking the TRS. We found that this system goes through a quantum phase transition from the topological to the non-topological phase, and, by tracing the evolution of the electronic states using the angle-resolved photoemission, we observed that the massless Dirac state in TlBiSe 2 switches to a massive state before it disappears in the non-topological phase. This result suggests the existence of a condensed-matter version of the ‘Higgs mechanism’ where particles acquire a mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking.