Journal
PHYSICAL REVIEW B
Volume 101, Issue 24, Pages -Publisher
AMER PHYSICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.101.245132
Keywords
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Funding
- National Science Foundation [NSF PHY-1748958]
- Australian Research Council [FT180100211, DP200101118]
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [SFB 1143, 247310070]
- Wurzburg-Dresden Cluster of Excellence on Complexity and Topology in Quantum Matter-ct.qmat [EXC 2147, 39085490]
- Australian Research Council [FT180100211, DP200101118] Funding Source: Australian Research Council
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Band structures of topological insulators are characterized by nonlocal topological invariants. Consequently, proposals for the experimental detection using local probes are rare. A recent paper [R.-J. Slager et al., Phys. Rev. B 92, 085126 (2015)] has argued, based on theoretical results for a particular class of models, that insulators with topologically trivial and nontrivial band structures in two space dimensions display a qualitatively different response to pointlike impurities. Here, we present a comprehensive investigation of the impurity response of a large set of models of noninteracting electrons on the honeycomb lattice, driven insulating by either broken inversion, broken time-reversal, broken C-3, or broken translation symmetry. These cases include Hofstadter bands, strain-induced pseudo-Landau levels, and higher-order topological insulators. Our results confirm that for hopping models respecting the lattice symmetries, the response to a single impurity can indeed distinguish between trivial and nontrivial band topology. However, for modulated or inhomogeneous host systems we find that trivial states of matter can display an impurity response akin to that of topologically nontrivial states, and thus the diagnostic fails.
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