We consider a magnetic skyrmion crystal formed at the surface of a topological insulator. Incorporating the exchange interaction between the helical Dirac surface states and the periodic Neel or Bloch skyrmion texture, we obtain the resulting electronic band structures. We discuss the properties of the reconstructed skyrmion bands, namely the impact of symmetries on the energies and Berry curvature. We find substantive qualitative differences between the Neel and Bloch cases, with the latter generically permitting a low-energy tight-binding representation whose parameters are tightly constrained by symmetries. We explicitly construct the associated Wannier orbitals, which resemble the ring-like chiral bound states of helical Dirac fermions coupled to a single skyrmion in a ferromagnetic background. We construct a two-band tight-binding model with complex nearest-neighbor hoppings which captures the salient topological features of the low-energy bands. Our results are relevant to magnetic topological insulators (TIs), as well as to TI-magnetic thin film heterostructures, in which skyrmion crystals may be stabilized.
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