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Dirac node engineering and flat bands in doped Dirac materials

Anna Pertsova1, Peter Johnson2, Daniel P. Arovas3, and Alexander V. Balatsky1,4

  • 1Nordita, Roslagstullsbacken 23, SE-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 2Condensed Matter Physics Materials Science Department, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, New York 11973-5000, USA
  • 3Department of Physics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA
  • 4Department of Physics, University of Connecticut, Storrs, Connecticut 06269, USA

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Phys. Rev. Research 3, 033001 – Published 1 July, 2021

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.3.033001

Abstract

We suggest the tried approach of impurity band engineering to produce flat bands and additional nodes in Dirac materials. We show that surface impurities give rise to nearly flat impurity bands close to the Dirac point. The hybridization of the Dirac nodal state induces the splitting of the surface Dirac nodes and the appearance of new nodes at high-symmetry points of the Brillouin zone. The results are robust and not model dependent: our tight-binding calculations are supported by a low-energy effective model of a topological insulator surface state hybridized with an impurity band. Finally, we address the effects of electron-electron interactions between localized electrons on the impurity site. We confirm that the correlation effects, while producing band hybridization and the Kondo effect, keep the hybridized band flat. Our findings open up prospects for impurity band engineering of nodal structures and flat-band correlated phases in doped Dirac materials.

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Phys. Rev. Research 3, 033001– Published 1 July, 2021
  • Received 30 December 2020
  • Accepted 25 March 2021
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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