Imaging emergent heavy Dirac fermions of a topological Kondo insulator

Kondo insulators are primary candidates in the search for strongly correlated topological quantum phases, which may host topological order, fractionalization, and non-Abelian statistics. Within some Kondo insulators, the hybridization gap is predicted to protect a nontrivial topological invariant and to harbor emergent heavy Dirac fermion surface modes. We use high-energy-resolution spectroscopic imaging in real and momentum space on the Kondo insulator, SmB$_6$. On cooling through $T^*_Δ\approx$ 35 K we observe the opening of an insulating gap that expands to $Δ\approx$ 10 meV at 2 K. Within the gap, we image the formation of linearly dispersing surface states with effective masses reaching $m^* = (410\pm20)m_e$. We thus demonstrate existence of a strongly correlated topological Kondo insulator phase hosting the heaviest known Dirac fermions.

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