Optical conductivity for the surface of a Topological Insulator

D. Schmeltzer, K. Ziegler

Published 2013-02-18Version 1

The optical conductivity for the surface excitations for a Topological Insulator as a function of the chemical potential and disorder is considered. Due to the time reversal symmetry the chiral metallic surface states are protected against disorder. This allow to use the averaged single particle Green's function to compute the optical conductivity. We compute the conductivity in the limit of a finite disorder. We find that the conductivity as a function of the chemical potential $\mu $ and frequency $\Omega$ is given by the universal value $\sigma(\Omega>2\mu)= \frac{e^2 \pi}{8h}$. For frequencies $\Omega< \mu$ and elastic mean free path $l_{el}=v\tau$ which obey $k_{F}l>1$ we obtain the conductivity is given by $\sigma(\Omega<2|\mu|)=\frac{e^2}{2h}\frac{k_{F}l_{el}}{(\Omega \tau)^2+1}$. In the limit of zero disorder we find $\sigma(\mu\neq0,\Omega, k_{F}l\rightarrow \infty)=\frac{e^2 \pi}{2h}|\mu|\delta(\Omega)$.