Surface exceptional points in a topological Kondo insulator

Abstract

Correlated materials have appeared as an arena to study non-Hermitian effects as typically exemplified by the emergence of exceptional points. We show here that topological Kondo insulators are an ideal platform for studying these phenomena due to strong correlations and surface states exhibiting a nontrivial spin texture. Using numerical simulations, we demonstrate the emergence of exceptional points in the single-particle Green's function on the surface of the material while the bulk is still insulating. We reveal how quasiparticle states with long lifetimes are created on the surface by non-Hermitian effects while the Dirac cones are smeared, which explains the surface Kondo breakdown at which heavy Dirac cones disappear from the single-particle spectrum and are replaced by light states. We further show how the non-Hermiticty changes the spin texture inherent in the surface states, which might help identify exceptional points experimentally. Besides confirming the existence of non-Hermitian effects on the surface of a topological Kondo insulator, this paper demonstrates how the eigenstates and eigenvalues of the effective non-Hermitian matrix describing the single-particle Green's function help understand the properties of correlated materials.