Chemical Aspects of Topological Materials

Date

Aug 13, 2018

Time

10:45 AM - 11:45 AM

Speaker

Prof. Anna Isaeva

Affiliation

TU Dresden, Institut für Anorganische Chemie II

Language

en

Main Topic

Materialien

Other Topics

Materialien, Physik

Host

Kerstin Höllerer

Description

A decade after the pioneering experimental discovery of topological insulators in HgTe/CdTe quantum wells and in the Bi2Te3 family, there exists an entire palette of various topological phases of matter, hosting new quasiparticles and presumably capable of manifesting quantum phenomena under normal conditions. To name just a few symmetry-protected topological phases, topological semimetals (Dirac and Weyl), magnetic topological insulators and superconductors, skyrmions, topological photonic crystals, etc. have been accounted for. The hallmark of all various classes of topological materials are peculiar surface states that are 1) triggered by band inversion; 2) are robust against surface perturbations thanks to the bulk symmetries (bulk-boundary correspondence) and 3) sustain transport (and magnetic) phenomena differing considerably from the bulk properties. Absence of direct structure-property interrelation complicates the systematic pursuit of new topological materials. Chemical bonding is the other X factor that contributes into the problem. Against this colorful background landscape, our synergetic efforts of chemists, theoreticians and experimental physicists (TU Dresden, MPI Stuttgart, IFW Dresden, RWTH Aachen, EPFL, DIPC San-Sebastian (Spain)) aim at the search for new topological materials amongst layered bulk halides and chalcogenides. The layered structure type allows a relatively flexible interchange and/or chemical modification of the constituting structural fragments – a “chemical” modular approach to tackle topological properties. Despite the seeming simplicity, this approach has yielded nine new representatives with non-trivial band structures. In this talk, the most recent newcomers will be presented along with our systematic observations on how structural/compositional modifications steer evolution of topological properties.

Links

• Seminars at the IFW

Last modified: Aug 13, 2018, 2:05:36 AM