Robustness of Rashba and Dirac Fermions against Strong Disorder.

ABSTRACT: By addressing the interplay between substitutional disorder and spin-orbit-coupling in chalcogenide alloys, we predict a strong robustness of spectral features at the Fermi energy. Indeed, supplementing our state of the art first-principles calculations with modeling analysis, we show that the disorder self-energy is vanishingly small close to the band gap, thus i) allowing for bulk Rashba-like spin splitting to be observed in ferroelectric alloys by means of Angle Resolved PhotoEmission Spectroscopy, and ii) protecting the band-character inversion related to the topological transition in recently discovered Topological Crystalline Insulators. Such a protection against strong disorder, which we demonstrate to be general for three dimensional Dirac systems, has potential and valuable implic

SUBMITTER: Di Sante D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4650895 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature