Bulk and surface electronic structure of Bi4 Te3 from GW calculations and photoemission experiments

Abstract

We present a combined theoretical and experimental study of the electronic structure of stoichiometric Bi4Te3, a natural superlattice of alternating Bi2Te3 quintuple layers and Bi bilayers. In contrast to the related semiconducting compounds Bi2Te3 and Bi1Te1, density functional theory predicts Bi4Te3 is a semimetal. In this work, we compute the quasiparticle electronic structure of Bi4Te3 in the framework of the GW approximation within many-body perturbation theory. The quasiparticle corrections are found to modify the dispersion of the valence and conduction bands in the vicinity of the Fermi energy, leading to the opening of a small indirect band gap. Based on the analysis of the eigenstates, Bi4Te3 is classified as a dual topological insulator with bulk topological invariants Z2 (1; 111) and magnetic mirror Chern number nM = 1. The bulk GW results are used to build a Wannier-function-based tight-binding Hamiltonian that is further applied to study the electronic properties of the (111) surface. The comparison with our angle-resolved photoemission measurements shows excellent agreement between the computed and measured surface states and indicates the dual topological nature of Bi4Te3.