Incomplete protection of the surface Weyl cones of the Kondo insulator SmB 6 : Spin exciton scattering

The compound ${\mathrm{SmB}}_{6}$ is a Kondo insulator, where the lowest-energy bulk electronic excitations are spin-excitons. It also has surface states that are subjected to strong spin-orbit coupling. It has been suggested that ${\mathrm{SmB}}_{6}$ is also a topological insulator. Here we show that, despite the absence of time-reversal symmetry breaking and the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling, the chiral spin texture of the Weyl cone is not completely protected. In particular, we show that the spin-exciton-mediated scattering produces features in the surface electronic spectrum at energies separated from the surface Fermi energy by the spin-exciton energy. Despite the features being far removed from the surface Fermi energy, they are extremely temperature dependent. The temperature variation occurs over a characteristic scale determined by the dispersion of the spin-exciton. The structures may be observed by electron spectroscopy at low temperatures.