Topological magnetic crystalline insulators and corepresentation theory

Gapless surface states of time reversal invariant topological insulators are protected by the antiunitary nature of the time-reversal operation. Very recently, this idea was generalized to magnetic structures, in which time-reversal symmetry is explicitly broken, but there is still an antiunitary sy...

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Veröffentlicht in:Physical review. B, Condensed matter and materials physics Condensed matter and materials physics, 2015-03, Vol.91 (11), Article 115317
Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Rui-Xing, Liu, Chao-Xing
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Sprache:eng
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Zusammenfassung:Gapless surface states of time reversal invariant topological insulators are protected by the antiunitary nature of the time-reversal operation. Very recently, this idea was generalized to magnetic structures, in which time-reversal symmetry is explicitly broken, but there is still an antiunitary symmetry operation combining time-reversal symmetry and crystalline symmetry. These topological phases in magnetic structures are dubbed "topological magnetic crystalline insulators." In this work, we present a general theory of topological magnetic crystalline insulators in different types of magnetic crystals based on the corepresentation theory of magnetic crystalline symmetry groups. We construct two concrete tight-binding models of topological magnetic crystalline insulators, the C sub(4) [Theta] model and the [tau][Theta] model, in which topological surface states and topological invariants are calculated explicitly. Moreover, we check different types of antiunitary operators in magnetic systems and find that the systems with C sub(4) [Theta], C sub(6) [Theta], and [tau][Theta] symmetry are able to protect gapless surface states. Our work will pave the way to search for topological magnetic crystalline insulators in realistic magnetic materials.
ISSN:1098-0121
1550-235X
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevB.91.115317