Exhaustive List of Topological Hourglass Band Crossings in 230 Space Groups (2001.06365v1)

Abstract: Topological semimetals with band crossings (BCs) near the Fermi level have attracted intense research activities in the past several years. Among various BCs, those enforced by an hourglass-like connectivity pattern, which are just located at the vertex in the neck of an hourglass and thus called hourglass BCs (HBCs), show interesting topological properties and are intimately related with the space group symmetry. Through checking compatibility relations in the Brillouin zone (BZ), we list all possible HBCs for all 230 space groups by identifying positions of HBCs as well as the compatibility relations related with the HBCs.The HBCs can be coexisting with conventional topological BCs such as Dirac andWeyl fermions and based on our exhaustive list, the dimensionality and degeneracy of the HBCs can be quickly identified. It is also found that the HBCs can be classified into two categories: one contains essential HBCs which are guaranteed to exist, while the HBCs in the other category may be tuned to disappear. Our results can help in efficiently predicting hourglass semimetals combined with first-principles calculations as well as studying transitions among various topological crystalline phases.