The recent discovery of topological Kondo insulators has triggered renewed interest in the well-known Kondo insulator samarium hexaboride, which is hypothesized to belong to this family. In this Letter, we study the spin texture of the topologically
protected surface states in such a topological Kondo insulator. In particular, we derive close relationships between (i) the form of the hybridization matrix at certain high-symmetry points, (ii) the mirror Chern numbers of the system, and (iii) the observable spin texture of the topological surface states. In this way, a robust classification of topological Kondo insulators and their surface-state spin texture is achieved. We underpin our findings with numerical calculations of several simplified and realistic models for systems like samarium hexaboride.
We construct a lattice model for a cubic Kondo insulator consisting of one spin-degenerate $d$ and $f$ orbital at each lattice site. The odd-parity hybridization between the two orbitals permits us to obtain various trivial and topological insulating
phases, which we classify in the presence of cubic symmetry. In particular, depending on the choice of our model parameters, we find a strong topological insulator phase with a band inversion at the $mathrm{X}$ point, modeling the situation potentially realized in SmB$_6$, and a topological crystalline insulator phase with trivial $mathbb{Z}_2$ indices but nonvanishing mirror Chern numbers. Using the Kotliar-Ruckenstein slave-boson scheme, we further demonstrate how increasing interactions among $f$ electrons can lead to topological phase transitions. Remarkably, for fixed band parameters, the $f$-orbital occupation number at the topological transitions is essentially independent of the interaction strength, thus yielding a robust criterion to discriminate between different phases.
Lattices with a basis can host crystallographic defects which share the same topological charge (e.g.~the Burgers vector $vec b$ of a dislocation) but differ in their microscopic structure of the core. We demonstrate that in insulators with particle-
hole symmetry and an odd number of orbitals per site, the microscopic details drastically affect the electronic structure: modifications can create or annihilate non-trivial bound states with an associated fractional charge. We show that this observation is related to the behavior of end modes of a dimerized chain and discuss how the end or defect states are predicted from topological invariants in these more complicated cases. Furthermore, using explicit examples on the honeycomb lattice, we explain how bound states in vacancies, dislocations and disclinations are related to each other and to edge modes and how similar features arise in nodal semimetals such as graphene.
We study the superfluid and insulating phases of interacting bosons on the triangular lattice with an inverted dispersion, corresponding to frustrated hopping between sites. The resulting single-particle dispersion has multiple minima at nonzero wave
vectors in momentum space, in contrast to the unique zero-wavevector minimum of the unfrustrated problem. As a consequence, the superfluid phase is unstable against developing additonal chiral order that breaks time reversal (T) and parity (P) symmetries by forming a condensate at nonzero wavevector. We demonstrate that the loss of superfluidity can lead to an even more exotic phase, the chiral Mott insulator, with nontrivial current order that breaks T, P. These results are obtained via variational estimates, as well as a combination of bosonization and DMRG of triangular ladders, which taken together permit a fairly complete characterization of the phase diagram. We discuss the relevance of these phases to optical lattice experiments, as well as signatures of chiral symmetry breaking in time-of-flight images.
