Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Two-sentence review of topological insulators

Creativity comes when one finds something interesting where the situation seems rather normal or when one makes a breakthrough where the difficulty seems so considerable that no progress can be made. The discovery of topological insulators is surely of the former type. It is just a combination of two factors:
(1) band structure invariant under time reversal operation;
(2) surface states that exist and cross and expand the whole bulk band gap.

A good article is: Liang Fu and C.L.Kane, cond-mat/0611341

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