Interference and transport properties of conductions electrons on the surface of a topological insulator

Abstract

The surface conductivity for conduction electrons with a fixed chirality in a topological insulator with impurities scattering is considered. The surface excitations are described by the Weyl Hamiltonian. For a finite chemical potential one projects out the hole band and one obtains a single electronic band with a fixed chirality. One obtains a model of spinless electrons which experience a half vortex when they return to the origin. As a result the conductivity is equivalent to a spinless problem with correlated noise which gives rise to anti-localization. We compute conductivity as a function of frequency and compare our results with the $Raman$ shift measurement for $Bi_{2}Se_{3}$.