Condensed Matter
This series consists of talks in the area of Condensed Matter.
Seminar Series Events/Videos
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Friday Nov 25, 2011Speaker(s):
I will describe our recent work on a new topological phase of matter: topological Weyl semimetal. This phase arises in three-dimensional (3D) materials, which are close to a critical point between an ordinary and a topological insulator. Breaking time-reversal symmetry in such materials, for example by doping with sufficient amount of magnetic impurities, leads to the formation of a Weyl semimetal phase, with two (or more) 3D Dirac nodes, separated in momentum space.
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Friday Nov 18, 2011Speaker(s):
Topology has many different manifestations in condensed matter physics. Real space examples include topological defects such as vortices, while momentum space ones include topological band structures and singularities in the electronic dispersion. In this talk, I will focus on two examples. The first is that of a vortex in a topological insulator that is doped into the superconducting state. This system, we find, has Majorana zero modes and thus, is a particularly simple way of obtaining these states.
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Tuesday Nov 15, 2011Speaker(s):
Dualities in physics are well known for their conceptual depth and quantitative predictive power in contexts where perturbation theory is unreliable. They are also remarkable for the staggering arrange of physical problems that exploit them, ranging from the study of confinement and unconventional phases in statistical mechanics and field theory to the unification of the string theory landscape.
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Tuesday Nov 15, 2011Speaker(s):
Weak topological insulators have an even number of Dirac cones in their surface spectrum and are thought to be unstable to disorder, which leads to an insulating surface. Here we argue that the presence of disorder alone will not localize the surface states, rather, the presence of a time-reversal symmetric mass term is required for localization.
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Monday Nov 07, 2011Speaker(s):
We report on our recent progress to investigate materials classes exhibiting d+id superconductivity, where topologically nontrivial pairing phases can emerge. Specifically, motivated by recent experimental progress, we show that graphene doped to the van Hove regime can give rise to a plethora of interesting ordering instabilities such as spin density wave and superconductivity.
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Friday Nov 04, 2011Speaker(s):
It has been well-known that topological phenomena with fractional excitations, i.e., the fractional quantum Hall effect (FQHE) will emerge when electrons move in Landau levels. In this talk, I will show FQHE can emergy even in the absence of Landau levels in interacting fermion models and boson models. The non-interacting part of our Hamiltonian contains topologically nontrivial flat band.
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Friday Oct 21, 2011Speaker(s):
Recently, we developed a user friendly scheme based on the quantum kinetic equation for studying thermal transport phenomena in the presence of interactions and disorder . This scheme is suitable for both a systematic perturbative calculation as well as a general analysis. We believe that this method presents an adequate alternative to the Kubo formula, which for thermal transport is rather cumbersome. We have applied this approach in the study of the Nernst signal in superconducting films above the critical temperature.
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Friday Sep 16, 2011Speaker(s):
We investigate the entanglement spectra of topological insulators which have gapless edge states on their spatial boundaries. In the physical energy spectrum, a subset of the edge states that intersect the Fermi level translates to discontinuities in the trace of the single-particle entanglement spectrum, which we call a `trace index'. We find that any free-fermion topological insulator that exhibits spectral flow has a non-vanishing trace index, which provides us with a new description of topological invariants.
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Wednesday Sep 14, 2011Speaker(s):
Time-reversal invariant band insulators can be separated into two categories: `ordinary' insulators and `topological' insulators. Topological band insulators have low-energy edge modes that cannot be gapped without violating time-reversal symmetry, while ordinary insulators do not. A natural question is whether more exotic time-reversal invariant insulators (insulators not connected adiabatically to band insulators) can also exhibit time-reversal protected edge modes.
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Monday Aug 29, 2011Speaker(s):
Strongly correlated electron systems are play grounds for exotic quantum states such as high Tc superconductivity, quantum spin liquids, non-fermi liquids and so on. Recently high Tc superconductivity has been observed in an iron based compound K2Fe4Se5. I will present a model and outline an effective theory [1] that describes physics of this complex system - a non linear O(3) sigma model in 2 + 1 dimensions coupled to Dirac fermions. Topological solitons and induced quantum numbers are well known in Skyrme model for protons and neutrons.
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