Signatures of dephasing by mirror-symmetry breaking in weak-antilocalization magnetoresistance across the topological transition in Pb1−xSnxSe

Abstract

Many conductors, including recently studied Dirac materials, show saturation of coherence length on decreasing temperature. This surprising phenomenon is assigned to external noise, residual magnetic impurities or two-level systems specific to non-crystalline solids. Here, by considering the SnTe-class of compounds as an example, we show theoretically that breaking of mirror symmetry deteriorates Berry's phase quantization, leading to additional dephasing in weak-antilocalization magnetoresistance (WAL-MR). Our experimental studies of WAL-MR corroborate these theoretical expectations in (111) Pb$_{1-x}$Sn$_x$Se thin film with Sn contents $x$ corresponding to both topological crystalline insulator and topologically trivial phases. In particular, we find the shortening of the phase coherence length in samples with intentionally broken mirror symmetry. Our results indicate that the classification of quantum transport phenomena into universality classes should encompass, in addition to time-reversal and spin-rotation invariances, spatial symmetries in specific systems.