Observation of oscillatory relaxation in the Sn-terminated surface of epitaxial rock-salt SnSe \(\{111\}\) topological crystalline insulator

Topological crystalline insulators have been recently predicted and observed in rock-salt structure SnSe \(\{111\}\) thin films. Previous studies have suggested that the Se-terminated surface of this thin film with hydrogen passivation, has a reduced surface energy and is thus a preferred configurat...

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Published in:arXiv.org 2017-04
Main Authors: Jin, Wencan, Vishwanath, Suresh, Liu, Jianpeng, Kong, Lingyuan, Lou, Rui, Dai, Zhongwei, Sadowski, Jerzy T, Liu, Xinyu, Lien, Huai-Hsun, Chaney, Alexander, Han, Yimo, Cao, Micheal, Ma, Junzhang, Tian Qian, Dadap, Jerry I, Wang, Shancai, Dobrowolska, Malgorzata, Furdyna, Jacek, Muller, David A, Pohl, Karsten, Ding, Hong, Xing, Huili Grace, Osgood, Richard M, Jr
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Configurations
Crystal structure
Crystallinity
Density functional theory
Electrical measurement
Epitaxial growth
Insulators
Interlayers
Low energy electron diffraction
Mathematical analysis
Photoelectric emission
Surface energy
Thin films
Tin selenide
Topology
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Summary:Topological crystalline insulators have been recently predicted and observed in rock-salt structure SnSe \(\{111\}\) thin films. Previous studies have suggested that the Se-terminated surface of this thin film with hydrogen passivation, has a reduced surface energy and is thus a preferred configuration. In this paper, synchrotron-based angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, along with density functional theory calculations, are used to demonstrate conclusively that a rock-salt SnSe \(\{111\}\) thin film epitaxially-grown on \ce{Bi2Se3} has a stable Sn-terminated surface. These observations are supported by low energy electron diffraction (LEED) intensity-voltage measurements and dynamical LEED calculations, which further show that the Sn-terminated SnSe \(\{111\}\) thin film has undergone a surface structural relaxation of the interlayer spacing between the Sn and Se atomic planes. In sharp contrast to the Se-terminated counterpart, the observed Dirac surface state in the Sn-terminated SnSe \(\{111\}\) thin film is shown to yield a high Fermi velocity, \(0.50\times10^6\)m/s, which suggests a potential mechanism of engineering the Dirac surface state of topological materials by tuning the surface configuration.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1704.02928