Eur. Phys. J. B (2018) 91: 164
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjb/e2018-90300-9

Regular Article

Effect of the hexagonal warping on the dynamical conductivity of surface states in a topological insulator

¹ School of Physics and Electronics, Hunan University, Changsha 410082, P.R. China
² School of Physics, University of Wollongong, Wollongong NSW 2522, Australia

^a e-mail: czhang@uow.edu.au

Received: 30 April 2018
Received in final form: 21 May 2018
Published online: 16 July 2018

Abstract

We report on the effect of hexagonal warping on the dynamical conductivity of the surface states of a topological insulator in the presence of nonmagnetic impurities. It is found that the photon energy dependent conductivities are determined by a polarization-function-liked term,  Π₂ (q,ω), which contains a velocity term corresponding to the difference of group velocities between the two states due to an electron-impurity scattering. This is different from the conductivity of 2-dimentional electron systems where the conductivity depends on the inverse imaginary part of the dielectric function Im [1/κ(q,ω)]. We present both the real part and imaginary part of the polarization function with different warping strength. It is found that the warping strength can both enhance single particle excitations (SPEs) and suppress the screening effect of electrons. As a result the inverse scattering time is enhanced by up to about two orders of magnitudes. The real part of the longitudinal conductivity of the intra-band process is analog to the case with a conductivity of σ ~ μδ(ω). The broadening of the spectrum in the low energy is not only determined by chemical potential, but also dependent on the warping strength. At higher frequency, the real part of conductivity shows a jump at the threshold photon energy of μ, where the inter-band contribution takes over.