The surface states of 3D topological insulators in general have negligible quantum oscillations when the chemical potential is tuned to the Dirac points. In contrast, we find that topological Kondo insulators can support surface states with an arbitrarily large Fermi surface when the chemical potential is pinned to the Dirac point. We illustrate that these Fermi surfaces give rise to finite-frequency quantum oscillations, which can become comparable to the extremal area of the unhybridized bulk bands. We show that this occurs when the crystal symmetry is lowered from cubic to tetragonal in a minimal two-orbital model. We label such surface modes as `shadow surface states'. Moreover, we show that the sufficient next-nearest neighbor out-of-plane hybridization leading to shadow surface states can be self-consistently stabilized for tetragonal topological Kondo insulators. Consequently, shadow surface states provide an important example of high-frequency quantum oscillations beyond the context of cubic topological Kondo insulators.
We examine how the properties of the Kondo insulators change when the symmetry of the underlying crystal field multiplets is taken into account. We employ the Anderson lattice model and consider its low-energy physics. We show that in a large class of crystal field configurations, Kondo insulators can develop a topological non-trivial ground-state. Such topological Kondo insulators are adiabatically connected to non-interacting insulators with unphysically large spin-orbit coupling, and as such may be regarded as interaction-driven topological insulators. We analyze the entanglement entropy of…
Kondo insulators are particularly simple type of heavy electron material, where a filled band of heavy quasiparticles gives rise to a narrow band insulator. Starting with the Anderson lattice Hamiltonian, we develop a topological classification of emergent band structures for Kondo insulators and show that these materials may host three-dimensional topological insulating phases. We propose a general and practical prescription of calculating the Z_2 strong and weak topological insulator indices for various lattice structures. Experimental implications of the topological Kondo insulating behavio…
As an exemplary Kondo insulator, SmB6 has been studied for several decades; however, direct evidence for the development of the Kondo coherent state and the evolution of the electronic structure in the material has not been obtained due to the rather complicated electronic and thermal transport behavior. Recently, these open questions attracted increasing attention as the emergence of a time-reversal invariant topological surface state in the Kondo insulator has been suggested. Here, we use point-contact spectroscopy to reveal the temperature dependence of the electronic states in SmB6. We dem…
Topological Kondo insulators are a new class of topological insulators in which metallic surface states protected by topological invariants reside in the bulk band gap at low temperatures. Unlike other three-dimensional topological insulators, a truly insulating bulk state, which is critical for potential applications in next-generation electronic devices, is guaranteed by many-body effects in the topological Kondo insulator. Furthermore, the system has strong electron correlations that can serve as a testbed for interacting topological theories. This topical review focuses on recent advances …
Heavy fermion systems contain not only strong electron correlations, which promote a rich set of quantum phases, but also a large spin-orbit coupling, which tends to endow the electronic states a topological character. Kondo insulators are understood in terms of a lattice of local moments coupled to conduction electrons in a half-filled band, i.e., with a dense population of about one electron per unit cell. Here, we propose that a new class of Kondo insulator arises when the conduction-electron band is nearly empty ( or, equivalently, full ) . We demonstrated the effect through a honeycomb An…
Starting from the kp method in combination with first-principles calculations, we systematically derive the effective Hamiltonians that capture the low energy band structures of recently discovered topological Kondo insulator SmB6. Using these effective Hamiltonians we can obtain both the energy dispersion and the spin texture of the topological surface states, which can be detected by further experiments.
The thermal expansion and heat capacity of FeSb2 at ambient pressure agrees with a picture of a temperature induced spin state transition within the Fe t_{2g} multiplet. However, high pressure powder diffraction data show no sign of a structural phase transition up to 7GPa. A bulk modulus B=84(3)GPa has been extracted and the temperature dependence of the Gruneisen parameter has been determined. We discuss here the relevance of a Kondo insulator description for this material.
We have studied the photoexcited carrier relaxation dynamics in the Kondo insulator SmB6 and the heavy fermion metal YbAgCu4 as a function of temperature and excitation level. The dynamic response is found to be both strongly temperature dependent and nonlinear. The data are analyzed with a Rothwarf-Taylor bottleneck model, where the dynamics are governed by the presence of a narrow gap in the density of states near the Fermi level. The remarkable agreement with the model suggests that carrier relaxation in a broad class of heavy electron systems (both metals and insulators) is governed by the…
SmB6 is a promising candidate for topological Kondo insulator. In this letter, we report ultrafast carrier dynamics of SmB6. Two characteristic temperatures: T1=100 K and T2= 20 K are observed. T1 corresponds to the opening of the f-d hybridization gap revealed by an abrupt disappearance of terahertz f-band plasmon oscillations. Between T1 and T2, a phonon bottleneck effect dominates the photocarrier relaxation processes. Below T2, we observe the formation of in-gap states, which are strongly affected by optically injected hot electrons and the transient electron temperature change.
Properties of a nonmagnetic impurity in Kondo insulators are investigated by considering a one-dimensional Kondo lattice model with depletion of a localized spin. The ground-state phase diagram determined by the Lanczos method shows that the magnetic moment is more stable than in ordinary metals. Temperature dependence of impurity susceptibilities is also studied by using the finite-temperature density-matrix renormalization group.
Recently, the resistance saturation at low temperature in Kondo insulator SmB6, a long-standing puzzle in condensed matter physics, was proposed to originate from topological surface state. Here,we systematically studied the magnetoresistance of SmB6 at low temperature up to 55 Tesla. Both temperature- and angular-dependent magnetoresistances show a similar crossover behavior below 5 K. Furthermore, the angular-dependent magnetoresistance on different crystal face confirms a two-dimensional surface state as the origin of magnetoresistances crossover below 5K. Based on two-channels model consis…
Topological insulators are a class of materials with insulating bulk but protected conducting surfaces due to the combination of spin-orbit interactions and time-reversal symmetry. The surface states are topologically non-trivial and robust against non-magnetic backscattering, leading to interesting physics and potential quantum computing applications1, 2. Recently there has been a fast growing interest in samarium hexboride (SmB6), a Kondo insulator predicted to be the first example of a correlated topological insulator3, 4. Here we fabricated smooth thin films of nanocrystalline SmB6 films. …
A fascinating type of symmetry-protected topological states of matter are topological Kondo insulators, where insulating behavior arises from Kondo screening of localized moments via conduction electrons, and non-trivial topology emerges from the structure of the hybridization between the local-moment and conduction bands. Here we study the physics of Kondo holes, i.e., missing local moments, in three-dimensional topological Kondo insulators, using a self-consistent real-space mean-field theory. Such Kondo holes quite generically induce in-gap states which, for Kondo holes at or near the surfa…
SmB6 has recently been predicted to be a Topological Kondo Insulator, the first strongly correlated heavy fermion material to exhibit topological surface states. High quality crystals are necessary to investigate the topological properties of this material. Single crystal growth of the rare earth hexaboride, SmB6, has been carried out by the floating zone technique using a high power xenon arc lamp image furnace. Large, high quality single-crystals are obtained by this technique. The crystals produced by the floating zone technique are free of contamination from flux materials and have been ch…
Kondo insulators are emerging as a simplified setting to study both magnetic and metal-to-insulator quantum phase transitions. Here, we study a half-filled Kondo lattice model defined on a magnetically frustrated Shastry-Sutherland geometry. We determine a "global" phase diagram that features a variety of zero-temperature phases; these include Kondo-destroyed antiferromagnetic and paramagnetic metallic phases in addition to the Kondo-insulator phase. Our result provides the theoretical basis for understanding how applying pressure to a Kondo insulator can close its hybridization gap, liberate …
Heavy fermion materials have recently attracted attention for their potential to combine topological protection with strongly correlated electron physics. To date, the ideas of topological protection have been restricted to the heavy fermion or "Kondo" insulators with the simplest point-group symmetries. Here we argue that the presence of nonsymmorphic crystal symmetries in many heavy fermion materials opens up a new family of topologically protected heavy electron systems. Re-examination of archival resistivity measurements in nonsymmorphic heavy fermion insulators Ce$_3$Bi$_4$Pt$_3$ and CeNi…
Motivated by the observation of light surface states in SmB6, we examine the effects of surface Kondo breakdown in topological Kondo insulators. We present both numerical and analytic results which show that the decoupling of the localized moments at the surface disturbs the compensation between light and heavy electrons and dopes the Dirac cone. Dispersion of these uncompensated surface states are dominated by inter-site hopping, which leads to a much lighter quasiparticles. These surface states are also highly durable against the effects of surface magnetism and decreasing thickness of the s…
We use scanning tunneling microscopy to investigate the (001) surface of cleaved SmB6 Kondo insulator. Variable temperature dI/dV spectroscopy up to 60 K reveals a gap-like density of state suppression around the Fermi level, which is due to the hybridization between the itinerant Sm 5d band and localized Sm 4f band. At temperatures below 40 K, a sharp coherence peak emerges within the hybridization gap near the lower gap edge. We propose that the in-gap resonance state is due to a collective excitation in magnetic origin with the presence of spin-orbital coupling and mixed valence fluctuation…
We propose the notion of spin-selective Kondo insulator, which provides a fundamental mechanism to describe the ferromagnetic phase of the Kondo lattice model with antiferromagnetic coupling. This unveils a remarkable feature of the ferromagnetic metallic phase: the majority-spin conduction electrons show metallic- while the minority-spin electrons show insulating-behavior. The resulting Kondo gap in the minority spin sector, which is due to the cooperation of ferromagnetism and partial Kondo screening, evidences a dynamically-induced commensurability for a combination of minority-spin electro…
Resistivities of heavy-fermion insulators typically saturate below a characteristic temperature $T^*$. For some, metallic surface states, potentially from a non-trivial bulk topology, are a likely source of residual conduction. Here, we establish an alternative mechanism: At low temperature, in addition to the charge gap, the scattering rate turns into a relevant energy scale, invalidating the semiclassical Boltzmann picture. Finite lifetimes of intrinsic carriers limit conduction, impose the existence of a crossover $T^*$, and control - now on par with the gap - the quantum regime emerging be…
Spectroscopic evidence for a molecular orbital Kondo insulator
University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory（劳伦斯伯克利国家实验室）；Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory（SLAC国家加速器实验室）；National Synchrotron Radiation Research Center（台湾国家同步辐射研究中心）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)（美国国家标准与技术研究院）
In order to study the effects of strong magnetic field on Kondo insulators, we calculate magnetization curves and single-particle excitation spectra of the periodic Anderson model at half-filling under finite magnetic field by using the self-consistent second-order perturbation theory combined with the local approximation which becomes exact in the limit of infinite spatial dimensions. Without magnetic field, the system behaves as an insulator with an energy gap, describing the Kondo insulators. By applying magnetic field to f-electrons, we found that the energy gap closes and the first order …
The discovery of topological insulators in non-interacting electron systems has motivated the community to search such topological states of matter in correlated electrons both theoretically and experimentally. In this paper we investigate a phase diagram for a topological Kondo insulating system, where an emergent "spin"-dependent Kondo effect gives rise to an inversion for heavy-fermion bands, responsible for a topological Kondo insulator. Resorting to the U(1) slave-boson mean-field analysis, we uncover an additional phase transition inside the Kondo insulating state in two dimensions, whic…
Recent theoretical calculations and experimental results suggest that the strongly correlated material SmB$_{6}$ may be a realization of a topological Kondo insulator. We have performed an angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy study on SmB$_{6}$ in order to elucidate elements of the electronic structure relevant to the possible occurrence of a topological Kondo insulator state. The obtained electronic structure in the whole three-dimensional momentum space reveals one electron-like 5d bulk band centred at the X point of the bulk Brillouin zone that is hybridized with strongly correlated f …
Quantum oscillations have long been regarded as the manifestation of the Fermi surface in metals. However, they were recently observed in Kondo insulators. We examine the Kondo screening due to Landau levels in Kondo insulators. It is shown that even for large Kondo insulating gaps, appreciable amplitudes of quantum oscillations that are consistent with experimental observations are present both in magnetization and resistivity. Specifically, we show that due to the periodic alignment between the Landau levels in the conduction and the f-orbit electrons, the Kondo screening itself undergoes os…
The recent discovery of topological Kondo insulators has triggered renewed interest in the well-known Kondo insulator samarium hexaboride, which is hypothesized to belong to this family. In this Letter, we study the spin texture of the topologically protected surface states in such a topological Kondo insulator. In particular, we derive close relationships between (i) the form of the hybridization matrix at certain high-symmetry points, (ii) the mirror Chern numbers of the system, and (iii) the observable spin texture of the topological surface states. In this way, a robust classification of t…
Kondo insulators are strongly correlated system in which a clean insulating gap emerges only at very low temperature due to many-body effects involving localized $f$-electrons. However, certain Kondo insulators, like SmB$_6$ and Ce${_3}$Bi${_4}$Pt${_3}$, display metallic behaviors at extremely low temperatures, that have defied current understanding. Recent advances in topological effects in materials has raised the attention on the protected surface states in these "topological Kondo insulators" as a potential resolution to some of the puzzling behaviors. Here we resolve these puzzles via a d…
The continuous quantum phase transition and the nature of quantum critical point (QCP) in a modified Kondo lattice model with Ising anisotropic exchange interactions is studied within the density-matrix renormalization group algorithm. We investigate the effect of quantum fluctuations on critical Kondo destruction QCP, by probing static and dynamic properties of the magnetic order and the Kondo effect. In particular, we identify that local Kondo physics itself becomes critical at the magnetic phase transition point, providing unbiased evidences for local quantum criticality between two insulat…
The periodic Anderson lattice model for the crystalline electric field (CEF)split 4f quartet states is used to describe the Yb-based Kondo insulators/semiconductors. In the slave-boson mean-field approximation, we derive the hybridized quasiparticle bands, and find that decreasing the hybridization difference of the two CEF quartets may induce an insulator-to-metal phase transition. The resulting metallic phase has a hole and an electron Fermi pockets. Such a phase transition may be realized experimentally by applying pressure, reducing the difference in hybridization of the two CEF quartets.
Current theories of Kondo insulators employ the interaction of conduction electrons with localized Kramers doublets originating from a tetragonal crystalline environment, yet all Kondo insulators are cubic. Here we develop a theory of cubic topological Kondo insulators involving the interaction of spin quartets with a conduction sea. The spin quartets greatly increase the potential for strong topological insulators, entirely eliminating the weak-topological phases from the diagram. We show that the relevant topological behavior in cubic Kondo insulators can only reside at the lower symmetry X …
The physics of a junction composed of a normal metal, quantum dot and 2D topological insulator (in a quantum spin Hall state) is elucidated. It maifests a subtle combination of Kondo correlations and quantum spin Hall edge states moving on the opposite sides of the 2D topological insulator. In a narrow strip geometry these edge states interact and a gap opens in the edge state spectrum. Consequently, Kondo screening is less effective and that affects electron transport through the junction. Specifically, when edge state coupling is strong enough, the tunneling differential conductance develops…
We argue that topological Kondo insulators can also have 'intrinsic' topological order associated with fractionalized excitations on their surfaces. The hydridization between the local moments and conduction electrons can weaken near the surface, and this enables the local moments to form spin liquids. This co-exists with the conduction electron surface states, realizing a surface fractionalized Fermi liquid. We present mean-field solutions of a Kondo-Heisenberg model which display such surfaces.
Strongly correlated electron systems show many exotic properties such as unconventional superconductity, quantum criticality, and Kondo insulating behavior. In addition, the Kondo insulator SmB6 has been predicted theoretically to be a 3D topological insulator with a metallic surface state. We report here transport measurements on doped SmB6, which show that ~3% magnetic and non-magnetic dopants in SmB6 exhibit clearly contrasting behavior, evidence that the metallic surface state is only destroyed when time reversal symmetry is broken. We find as well a quantum percolation limit of impurity c…
Motivated by the recent experimental observations of quantum oscillations in the Kondo insulators SmB$_6$ and YbB$_{12}$, we study magneto-optical conductivity of Kondo insulators. We show that there exist non-trivial cyclotron resonance peaks in a frequency domain below the hybridization gap as a result of the characteristic Landau level structure of the system. Furthermore, these low energy peaks are enhanced near the insulator-metal phase transition driven by an applied magnetic field and stable even at low temperatures. They are smoothly connected via Kondo effect to resonance peaks for un…
We study the transport properties of the Kondo insulator SmB$_6$ with a specialized configuration designed to distinguish bulk-dominated conduction from surface-dominated conduction. We find that as the material is cooled below 4 K, it exhibits a crossover from bulk to surface conduction with a fully insulating bulk. We take the robustness and magnitude of the surface conductivity, as is manifest in the literature of SmB$_6$, to be strong evidence for the topological insulator metallic surface states recently predicted for this material.
To gain further insight into the properties of interacting topological insulators, we study a 1 dimensional model of topological Kondo insulators which can be regarded as the strongly interacting limit of the Tamm-Shockley model. Treating the model in a large $N$ expansion, we find a number of competing ground-state solutions, including topological insulating and valence bond ground-states. One of the effects to emerge in our treatment is a reconstruction of the Kondo screening process near the boundary of the material ("Kondo band bending"). Near the boundary for localization into a valence b…
Impurities and defects in Kondo insulators can have an unusual impact on dynamics that blends with effects of intrinsic electron correlations. Such crystal imperfections are difficult to avoid, and their consequences are incompletely understood. Here we study magnetic impurities in Kondo insulators via perturbation theory of the s-d Kondo impurity model adapted to small bandgap insulators. The calculated magnetization and specific heat agree with recent thermodynamic measurements in samarium hexaboride (SmB$_6$). This qualitative agreement supports the physical picture of multi-channel Kondo s…
We study the influence of short range antiferromagnetic correlations between local $f$-electrons on the transport and thermodynamic properties of Kondo insulators, as first proposed by Coqblin et al. for metallic heavy fermions. The inter-site magnetic correlations produce an effective bandwidth for the $f$-electrons. They are treated on the same footing as the local Kondo correlations such that two energy scales appear in our approach. We discuss the competition between these two scales on the physical properties.
Kondo insulators are primary candidates in the search for strongly correlated topological quantum phases, which may host topological order, fractionalization, and non-Abelian statistics. Within some Kondo insulators, the hybridization gap is predicted to protect a nontrivial topological invariant and to harbor emergent heavy Dirac fermion surface modes. We use high-energy-resolution spectroscopic imaging in real and momentum space on the Kondo insulator, SmB$_6$. On cooling through $T^*_Δ\approx$ 35 K we observe the opening of an insulating gap that expands to $Δ\approx$ 10 meV at 2 K. Within …
The Kondo lattice model of spin-1/2 local moments coupled to the conduction electrons at half-filling is studied for its orbital response to magnetic field on bipartite lattices. Through an effective charge dynamics, in a canonical representation of electrons that appropriately describes the Kondo insulating ground state, the magnetization is found to show de Haas-van Alphen oscillations from intermediate to weak Kondo coupling. These oscillations are ascribed to Lifshitz-like inversion of a dispersion of the gapped quasiparticles, whose chemical potential surface is measured by the oscillatio…
The ground-state phase diagram of a half-filled anisotropic Kondo lattice model is calculated within a mean-field theory. For small transverse exchange coupling $J_{\perp}<J_{\perp c1}$, the ground state shows an antiferromagnetic long-range order with finite staggered magnetizations of both localized spins and conduction electrons. When $J_{\perp}>J_{\perp c2}$, the long-range order is destroyed and the system is in a disordered Kondo singlet state with a hybridization gap. Both ground states can describe the low-temperature phases of Kondo insulating compounds. Between these two distinct pha…
We consider a heterostructure of a metal and a paramagnetic Mott insulator using an adaptation of dynamical mean field theory to describe inhomogeneous systems. The metal can penetrate into the insulator via the Kondo effect. We investigate the scaling properties of the metal-insulator interface close to the critical point of the Mott insulator. At criticality, the quasiparticle weight decays as 1/x^2 with distance x from the metal within our mean field theory. Our numerical results (using the numerical renormalization group as an impurity solver) show that the prefactor of this power law is e…
Kondo insulators and in particular their non-cubic representatives have remained poorly understood. Here we report on the development of an anisotropic energy pseudogap in the tetragonal compound CeRu$_4$Sn$_6$ employing optical reflectivity measurements in broad frequency and temperature ranges, and local density approximation plus dynamical mean field theory calculations. The calculations provide evidence for a Kondo insulator-like response within the $a-a$ plane and a more metallic response along the c axis and qualitatively reproduce the experimental observations, helping to identify their…
We investigate the Kondo effect in the two-dimensional electron system with a non-trivial quadratic energy band crossing point. We show that the Kondo effect can induce a new hybrid topological insulator phase which is a coexistence state of the quantum anomalous Hall effect and the TRSbroken quantum spin Hall effect. This hybrid topological insulator exhibits not only a quantized charge Hall current but also a net spin current, which are localized at the edge boundaries. This peculiar topological state arises due to the interplay of two marginally relevant operators, i.e., the Kondo-coupling …
We consider the simplest variant of a Kondo insulator where a doublet of localized $f$-electrons hybridizes with spin-degenerate conduction electrons. We analyse the symmetries of $f$-orbitals involved in the hybridization and point out that the effective four-band model of such systems is adiabatically connected with one that possesses chiral symmetry, which provides further descriptions of clean Kondo insulators. We obtain general conditions for the appearance of topological non-trivial states and discuss implications for rare-earth based compounds. As an example, we derive the full phase di…
We have simulated a half-filled $1D$ $p$-wave periodic Anderson model with numerically exact projector quantum Monte Carlo technique, and the system is indeed located in the Haldane-like state as detected in previous works on the $p$-wave Kondo lattice model, though the soluble non-interacting limit corresponds to the conventional $Z_{2}$ topological insulator. The site-resolved magnetization in an open boundary system and strange correlator for the periodic boundary have been used to identify the mentioned topological states. Interestingly, the edge magnetization in the Haldane-like state is …
We discuss the quasiparticle band structure of the antiferromagnetic phase of the planar Kondo lattice model with a half-filled conduction band, the so-called Kondo insulator. The band structure is obtained by bond fermion technique and good agreement is obtained with the single particle spectral function obtained by Dynamical Cluster Approximation. In particular, various changes of the band structure with J/t observed in the numerical spectra are reproduced qualitatively by the calculation. In the absence of Fermi surface nesting we find a semimetallic phase for sufficiently small exchange co…
We study Kondo physics of a spin-$\frac{1}{2}$ impurity in electronic matter with strong spin-orbit interaction, which can be realized by depositing magnetic adatoms on the surface of a three-dimensional topological insulator. We show that magnetic properties of topological surface states and the very existence of Kondo screening strongly depend on details of the bulk material, and specifics of surface preparation encoded in time-reversal preserving boundary conditions for electronic wavefunctions. When this tunable Kondo effect occurs, the impurity spin is screened by purely orbital motion of…
Heavy-fermion or Kondo lattice materials are considered to be typical strongly correlated systems, for which mean-field approximations have shown that the Coulomb interaction increases the effective mass and narrows the band gap. In this paper, to clarify interaction effects on the electronic excitation, the spectral function of the Kondo lattice and periodic Anderson models is studied around Kondo insulators in the strong-coupling regime, by using the non-Abelian dynamical density-matrix renormalization group method and perturbation theory. Upon doping a Kondo insulator, an electronic mode em…
Abnormal electronic properties of complex systems require new ideas concerning explanation of their behavior and possibility of realization. In this acticle we show that a colossal magnetoresistance is realized in the state of the topological Kondo insulator, that is similar to the Kondo insulator state in the Kondo lattice. The mechanism of the phenomenon is the following: in the spin gapless phase an external magnetic field induces the gap in the spectrum of spin excitations, the gap in the spectrum of fermions is opened due to a hybridization between spin and fermion subsystems at half fill…
Kondo insulators combine strong electronic correlations with spin orbit coupling and thereby provide a potential realization of correlated topological insulators. We present model calculations which allow us to study the onset of bulk coherence and concomitant topological edge states from the mixed valence to local moment regimes. Our real-space dynamical mean-field results include the detailed temperature dependence of the single particle spectral function on slab geometries as well as the temperature dependence of the topological invariant. The relevance of our calculations for candidate mat…
The effect of binary alloy disorder on the ferromagnetic phases of f-electron materials is studied within the periodic Anderson model. We find that disorder in the conduction band can drastically enhance the Curie temperature due to an increase of the local f-moment. The effect may be explained qualitatively and even quantitatively by a simple theoretical ansatz. The emergence of an alloy Kondo insulator at non-integer filling is also pointed out.
Topological Kondo insulators (TKIs) are new type of symmetry-protected topological insulators, which develop through the interplay of strong correlations and spin-orbit interactions. In these materials, the bulk is a perfect band insulator due to Kondo screening of localized moments via conduction electrons. Furthermore, strong spin-orbit coupling (SOC) and crystal field effect (CFE) of the localized moments result in a nonlocal odd-parity, time-reversal invariant hybridization between the local-moments and conduction bands, which creates a ground-state with nontrivial topology and gapless sur…
A synergistic effect between strong electron correlation and spin-orbit interaction (SOI) has been theoretically predicted to result in a new topological state of quantum matter on Kondo insulators (KIs), so-called topological Kondo insulators (TKIs). One TKI candidate has been experimentally observed on the KI SmB6(001), and the origin of the surface states (SS) and the topological order of SmB6 has been actively discussed. Here, we show a metallic SS on the clean surface of another TKI candidate YbB12(001), using angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy. The SS showed temperature-dependent …
We investigate the competition between the spin-orbit interaction of itinerant electrons and their Kondo coupling with local moments densely distributed on the honeycomb lattice. We find that the model at half-filling displays a quantum phase transition between topological and Kondo insulators at a nonzero Kondo coupling. In the Kondo-screened case, tuning the electron concentration can lead to a new topological insulator phase. The results suggest that the heavy-fermion phase diagram contains a new regime with a competition among topological, Kondo-coherent and magnetic states, and that the r…
The electron spectrum structure in the half-filled Hubbard model is considered in terms of the one-particle Green's functions within many-electron representation. A simple analytical generalization of the single-site Hubbard-III approximation is obtained, which takes into account the Fermi excitations (Kondo terms). The problem of the metal-insulator transition is investigated. The occurrence of a three-peak density-of-states structure including the "Kondo" peak at the Fermi level is discussed. A comparison with large-d calculations is performed.
Combination of the finite-temperature density-matrix renormalization-group and the maximum entropy presents a new method to calculate dynamic quantities of one-dimensional many-body systems. In the present paper, density of states, local dynamic spin and charge correlation functions of the one-dimensional Kondo insulator are discussed. Excitation gaps open with decreasing temperature and the gaps take different values depending on channels. The excitation spectra change qualitatively around the characteristic temperature corresponding to the spin gap which is the lowest energy scale of the Kon…
Temperature dependence of the electronic structure of SmB6 is studied by high-resolution ARPES down to 1 K. We demonstrate that there is no essential difference for the dispersions of the surface states below and above the resistivity saturating anomaly (~ 3.5 K). Quantitative analyses of the surface states indicate that the quasi-particle scattering rate increases linearly as a function of temperature and binding energy, which differs from Fermi-Liquid behavior. Most intriguingly, we observe that the hybridization between the d and f states builds gradually over a wide temperature region (30 …
We study a layered three-dimensional heterostructure in which two types of Kondo insulators are stacked alternatingly. One of them is the topological Kondo insulator SmB 6 , the other one an isostructural Kondo insulator AB 6 , where A is a rare-earth element, e.g., Eu, Yb, or Ce. We find that if the latter orders ferromagnetically, the heterostructure generically becomes a magnetic Weyl Kondo semimetal, while antiferromagnetic order can yield a magnetic Dirac Kondo semimetal. We detail both scenarios with general symmetry considerations as well as concrete tight-binding calcu-lations and show…
