Gapped Dirac cones and spin texture in thin film topological insulator

Abstract

The protected surface states of topological insulators (TIs) form gapless Dirac cones corresponding nondegenerate eigenstates with helical spin polarization. The presence of a warping term deforms the isotropic cone of the most simple model into snowflake Fermi surfaces as in Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3. Their features have been identified in STM quasiparticle interference (QPI) experiments on isolated surfaces. Here we investigate the QPI spectrum for the TI thin film geometry with a finite tunneling between the surface states. This leads to a dramatic change of spectrum due to gapping and a change in spin texture that should leave distinct signatures in the QPI pattern. We consider both normal and magnetic exchange scattering from the surface impurities and obtain the scattering t matrix in Born approximation as well as the general closed solution. We show the expected systematic variation of QPI snowflake intensity features by varying film thickness and study, in particular, the influence on backscattering processes. We predict the variation of QPI spectrum for Bi2Se3 thin films using the observed gap dependence from ARPES results.