biostudies-literatureUnknown5Di Sante DBy 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 implicScientific reports11285https://www.ebi.ac.uk/biostudies/studies/S-EPMC4650895biostudies-literatureRobustness of Rashba and Dirac Fermions against Strong Disorder.PMC4650895Barone PDi Sante DPicozzi SPlekhanov ECiuchi SfalseRobustness of Rashba and Dirac Fermions against Strong Disorder.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 implic2015-01-01T00:00:00Z2015 Jun2025-04-04T07:52:03.369Z2019-03-27T02:02:19ZS-EPMC46508952606714610.1038/srep11285