The topological protected electronic states on the surface of a topological insulator can progressively change their Fermi cross section from circular to a snowflake shape as the chemical potential is increased above the Dirac point because of an hexagonal warping term in the Hamiltonian. Another effect of warping is to change the spin texture which exists when a finite gap is included by magnetic doping, although the in-plane spin component remains locked perpendicular to momentum. It also changes the orbital magnetic moment, the matrix element for optical absorption, and the circular dichroism. We find that the Fermi surface average of $z$ component of spin is closely related to the value of the Berry phase. This holds even when the Hamiltonian includes a subdominant nonrelativistic quadratic in momentum term (which provides particle-hole asymmetry) in addition to the dominant relativistic Dirac term. There is also a qualitative correlation between $\langle S_z\rangle$ and the dichroism. For the case when the chemical potential falls inside the gap between valence and conduction band, the Hall conductivity remains quantized and unaffected in value by the hexagonal warping term.

• Received 6 December 2013
• Revised 6 March 2014

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.89.165420