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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Dione Morton
Summary Sentence: Physics Colloquium
Full Summary: No summary paragraph submitted.
Seongshik OhAbout a decade ago, a little after graphene was discovered, a few theoretical physicists proposed that all solids can be grouped into different classes according to their band structure topologies: depending on which group of the topological families the solid belongs to, it is supposed to carry distinct electronic properties. This notion of topology applied to the band structure of materials gave rise to the birth of topological materials as a new paradigm of condensed matter physics. In particular, according to these theories, all insulators can be grouped into either of the two material classes: topological vs. trivial insulators. The conventional insulators we know are all trivial insulators but several materials such as Bi2Se3, Bi2Te3 and Sb2Te3 were proposed and later confirmed to be topological insulators (TIs), which are supposed to be insulating in the bulk but guaranteed to be metallic on their surfaces. Because of the strongly mathematical nature of the concept of topology, once the notion of topology started being applied to material systems, numerous theoretical proposals for various exotic functionalities have emerged. Nevertheless, only a very small set of those proposals have been realized, mostly due to various defect problems. In this talk, I will review and provide a perspective to the field, while discussing how to overcome these defect problems through thin film engineering schemes.
