# Topological States in Strongly-Correlated Materials

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## Recording Details

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PIRSA Number:
13110082

## Abstract

In the study of strongly-correlated insulators, a long-standing puzzle remained open for over 40 years. Some Kondo insulators (or mixed-valent insulators) display strange electrical transport that cannot be understood if one assumes that it is governed by the three-dimensional bulk. In this talk, I show that some 3D Kondo insulators have the right ingredients to be topological insulators, which we called “topological Kondo insulators”. For a topological Kondo insulator, the low-temperature transport is dominated by the 2D surface rather than the 3D bulk, because the bulk of this material is an insulator while its surface is a topologically-protected 2D metal. This theoretical picture offers a natural explanation for the long-standing puzzle mentioned above. In addition, we also find that Kondo insulators can support another type of nontrivial topological structure protected by lattice symmetries, which we called “topological crystalline Kondo insulators”. In particular, we predict that SmB$_6$ is both a topological Kondo insulator and a topological crystalline Kondo insulator and I will also discuss recent experiments, which reveal the surface states in SmB$_6$.