Abstract
The three-dimensional (3D) topological insulator is a novel quantum state of matter where an insulating bulk hosts a linearly dispersing surface state, which can be viewed as a sea of massless Dirac fermions protected by the time-reversal symmetry (TRS). Breaking the TRS by a magnetic order leads to the opening of a gap in the surface state1, and consequently the Dirac fermions become massive. It has been proposed theoretically that such a mass acquisition is necessary to realize novel topological phenomena2,3, but achieving a sufficiently large mass is an experimental challenge. Here we report an unexpected discovery that the surface Dirac fermions in a solid-solution system TlBi(S1−xSex)2 acquire a mass without explicitly breaking the TRS. We found that this system goes through a quantum phase transition from the topological to the non-topological phase, and, by tracing the evolution of the electronic states using the angle-resolved photoemission, we observed that the massless Dirac state in TlBiSe2 switches to a massive state before it disappears in the non-topological phase. This result suggests the existence of a condensed-matter version of the ‘Higgs mechanism’ where particles acquire a mass through spontaneous symmetry breaking.
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Acknowledgements
We thank N. Nagaosa for valuable discussions. We also thank H. Guo, K. Sugawara, M. Komatsu, T. Arakane and A. Takayama for their assistance in the ARPES experiment, and S. Sasaki for the analysis using EPMA. This work was supported by JSPS (KAKENHI 19674002 and NEXT Program), JST-CREST, MEXT of Japan (Innovative Area ‘Topological Quantum Phenomena’), AFOSR (AOARD 10-4103), and KEK-PF (Proposal number: 2009S2-005 and 2010G507).
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T.S., K.K., S.S., K.N., and T.T. performed ARPES measurements. K.S. K.E, T.M. and Y.A. carried out the growth of the single crystals and their characterizations. T.S., K.S. and Y.A. conceived the experiments and wrote the manuscript.
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Sato, T., Segawa, K., Kosaka, K. et al. Unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions at the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator. Nature Phys 7, 840–844 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2058
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys2058
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