A green's function approach for surface state photoelectrons in topological insulators

The topology of the surface electronic states is detected with photoemission. We explain the photoemission from the topological surface state . This is done by identifying the effective coupling between surface electrons-photons and vacuum electrons. The effective electron photon coupling is given by $eτ^2$ where $τ$ is the dimensionless tunneling amplitude of the zero mode surface states to tunnel into the vacuum. We compute the polarization and intensity of the emitted photoelectrons. We introduce a model which takes in account the Dirac Hamiltonian for the surface electron to photons coupling and the tunneling of the zero mode into the vacuum. Within the Green's function formalism we obtain exact results for the emitted Photoelectrons to second order in the laser field. The number of the emitted photoelectrons is sensitive to the laser coherent state intensity, the polarization is sensitive to the surface topology of the electronic states and the incoming photon polarization. The calculation is performed for the helical, Zeeman and warping case allowing to study spin textures.

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