Dynamics of impurity in the environment of Dirac fermions

We show that the energy gap induced by ferromagnetically aligned magnetic impurities on the surface of a topological insulator can be filled, due to scattering off the non-magnetic potential of the impurities. In both a continuum surface model and a three-dimensional tight-binding lattice model, we find that the energy gap disappears already at weak potential scattering as impurity resonances add spectral weight at the Dirac point. This can help explain seemingly contradictor...

We investigate dynamics of a single mobile impurity immersed in a bath of Anderson localized particles and focus on the regime of relatively strong disorder and interactions. In that regime, the dynamics of the system is particularly slow, suggesting, at short times, an occurrence of many-body localization. Considering longer time scales, we show that the latter is a transient effect and that, eventually, the impurity spreads sub-diffusively and induces a gradual delocalizati...

We present a systematic study of a mobile impurity immersed in a three-dimensional Fermi sea of fermions at finite temperature, by using the standard non-self-consistent many-body $T$-matrix theory that is equivalent to a finite-temperature variational approach with the inclusion of one-particle-hole excitation. The impurity spectral function is determined in the real-frequency domain, avoiding any potential errors due to the numerical analytic continuation in previous $T$-ma...

We compute the multifractal spectra associated to local density of states (LDOS) fluctuations due to weak quenched disorder, for a single Dirac fermion in two spatial dimensions. Our results are relevant to the surfaces of Z_2 topological insulators such as Bi_2Se_3 and Bi_2Te_3, where LDOS modulations can be directly probed via scanning tunneling microscopy. We find a qualitative difference in spectra obtained for magnetic versus non-magnetic disorder. Randomly polarized mag...

A two-dimensional superconductor (SC) on surfaces of topological insulators (TIs) is a mixture of s-wave and helical p-wave components when induced by s-wave interactions, since spin and momentum are correlated. On the basis of the Abrikosov-Gor'kov theory, we reveal that unconventional SCs on the surfaces of TIs are stable against time-reversal symmetric (TRS) impurities within a region of small impurity concentration. Moreover, we analyze the stability of the SC on the surf...

We show that the local in-gap Greens function of a band insulator $\mathbf{G}_0 (\epsilon,\mathbf{k}_{\parallel},\mathbf{r}_{\perp}=0)$, with $\mathbf{r}_\perp$ the position perpendicular to a codimension-1 or -2 impurity, reveals the topological nature of the phase. For a topological insulator, the eigenvalues of this Greens function attain zeros in the gap, whereas for a trivial insulator the eigenvalues remain nonzero. This topological classification is related to the exis...

We study the surface conductivity of a three dimensional topological insulator doped with magnetic impurities. The spin-momentum locking of surface electrons makes their scattering from magnetic impurities anisotropic and the standard relaxation time approximation is not applicable. Using the semiclassical Boltzmann approach together with a generalized relaxation time scheme, we obtain closed forms for the relaxation times and analytic expressions for the surface conductiviti...

We study spatial correlations in the ground state of a one-dimensional electron gas coupled to a dynamic quantum impurity. The system displays a non-trivial many-body effect known as the Fermi edge singularity: transitions between discrete internal states of the impurity have a power-law dependence on the internal energies of the impurity states. We present compact formulas for the static current-current correlator and the pair correlation function. These reveal that spatial ...

Magnetic ions such as Fe, Mn and Co with localized spins may be adsorbed on the surface of topological insulators like \Bi. They form scattering centers for the helical surface states which have a Dirac cone dispersion as long as the local spins are disordered. However, the local density of states (LDOS) may be severely modified by the formation of bound states. Commonly only elastic scattering due to normal and exchange potentials of the adatom is assumed. Magnetization meas...

The detailed study of the low-energy spectrum for a mobile impurity in the one-dimensional bosonic enviroment is performed. Particularly we have considered only two analytically accessible limits, namely, the case of an impurity immersed in a dilute Bose gas, where one can use many-body perturbation techniques for low-dimensional bosonic systemsm and the case of the Tonks-Girardeau gas, for which the usual fermionic diagrammatic expansion up to the second order is applied.