Interfacial Fermi Loops from Interfacial Symmetries

Abstract

We propose a concept of interfacial symmetries such as interfacial particle-hole symmetry and interfacial time-reversal symmetry, which appear in interfaces between two regions related to each other by particle-hole or time-reversal transformations. These symmetries result in novel dispersion of interface states. In particular for the interfacial particle-hole symmetry the gap closes along a loop ("Fermi loop") at the interface. We numerically demonstrate this for the Fu-Kane-Mele tight-binding model. We show that the Fermi loop originates from a sign change of a Pfaffian of a product between the Hamiltonian and a constant matrix.