Three Dirac points on the (110) surface of the topological insulator Bi1-xSbx

Topological insulator surfaces support metallic surface states with closed Fermi contours, encircling an odd number of Dirac points. Experimental studies have so far concentrated on surfaces with only one Dirac point, but three Dirac points can be expected for certain surface orientations of several topological insulator materials. Here we experimentally realize the Bi1-xSbx(110) surface for which an electronic structure with three Dirac points has been predicted (Teo et al 2008 Phys. Rev. B 78 045426), in contrast to the closed-packed (111) surface of the same material that supports only one Dirac point. We study the electronic structure of Bi1-xSbx(110) with angle-resolved photoemission and tight-binding calculations. We observe several metallic surface states, confirming not only the expectation that a topological insulator should be enclosed by metallic surfaces on all faces, but also the prediction of the surface state topology. Tight-binding calculations of the electronic structure are found to reproduce the expected topology of the surface states but they show one Dirac point that is not observed in the experiment, in the mirror line of the surface Brillouin zone. As in the case of Bi1-xSbx (111), this can be ascribed to an incorrect value of the mirror Chern number in the tight-binding parameters employed for the calculation. The quantitative agreement of the tight-binding calculation and the experiment is poorer than in the case of the (111) surface, something that is ascribed to the existence of dangling bonds on the (110) surface.