RQMP Research Seminar

Partial dislocations in higher order topological insulators

Raquel Queiroz

Weizmann Institute

Nonzero weak topological indices are thought to be a necessary condition to bind a single helical mode to a lattice dislocation. I will show that higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) can, in fact, host a single helical mode along screw or edge dislocations in the absence of weak topological indices. When this occurs, the helical mode is necessarily bound to a dislocation characterized by a fractional Burgers vector, macroscopically detected by the existence of a stacking fault. The robustness of a helical mode on a partial defect is demonstrated by an adiabatic transformation that restores translation symmetry in the stacking fault. Since partial defects and stacking faults are commonplace in bulk crystals, the existence of such helical modes can measurably affect the expected conductivity in these materials. Finally I will describe a general framework towards the classification of symmetry breaking defects based on symmetry representations.

Phys. Rev. Lett. 123, 266802 (2019) (arXiv:1809.03518)
arXiv:1908.00011