  The conducting states, recently discovered at the surface of two special
class of insulators -- topological insulators and topological crystalline
insulators - are distinguished by their insensitivity to local and non-magnetic
surface defects at a level of disorder, sufficiently small to be described
within the perturbation theory. However, the behavior of the surface states in
case of non local macroscopic imperfections is not clear. Here, we propose a
systematic study of the topological surface states on vicinal planes
(deviations from perfect surface cleavage) in a topological crystalline
insulator of the tin telluride family, by using realistic
first-principles-derived tight-binding models. The theoretical framework
proposed is quite general and easily permits the extensions to other
topological insulator families.
