Topological nature of the Kondo insulator SmB6 and its sensitiveness to Sm vacancy

The true topological nature of the Kondo insulator SmB6 remains to be unveiled. Our previous tunneling study not only found evidence for the existence of surface Dirac fermions, but it also uncovered that they inherently interact with the spin excitons, collective excitations in the bulk. We have extended such a spectroscopic investigation into crystals containing a Sm deficiency. The bulk hybridization gap is found to be insensitive to the deficiency up to 1% studied here, but the surface states in Sm-deficient crystals exhibit quite different temperature evolutions from those in stoichiometric ones. We attribute this to the topological surface states remaining incoherent down to the lowest measurement temperature due to their continued interaction with the spin excitons that remain uncondensed. This result shows that the detailed topological nature of SmB6 could vary drastically in the presence of disorder in the lattice. This sensitiveness to disorder is seemingly contradictory to the celebrated topological protection, but it can be understood as being due to the intimate interplay between strong correlations and topological effects.

Automated summary

The study found that surface states in SmB6 are affected by defects, exhibiting different temperature evolutions from stoichiometric crystals, indicating a drastic change in their topological nature. The sensitivity to defects seems contradictory to topological protection, but it can be understood as being due to the intimate interplay between strong correlations and topological effects.