Science Daily March 30, 2022
An international team of researchers (USA – Princeton University, France, Germany, China, Spain) has developed a catalog of the naturally occurring three-dimensional stoichiometric materials with flat bands around the Fermi level. They considered 55,206 materials from the Inorganic Crystal Structure Database which provides their structural parameters, space group, band structure, density of states and topological characterization and combined several direct signatures and properties of band flatness with a high-throughput analysis of all crystal structures. From this set they created the Materials Flatband Database website https://www.topologicalquantumchemistry.fr/flatbands/ , with its own search engine for future theoretical and experimental studies. From the database they extracted a curated list of 2,379 high-quality flat-band materials, from which they identified 345 promising candidates that potentially host flat bands with charge centres that are not strongly localized on the atomic sites. They showcase five representative materials and provided a theoretical explanation for the origin of their flat bands close to the Fermi energy using the S-matrix method introduced in a parallel work…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
An illustration of the three possible types of flat band. Credit: Nature volume 603, pages824–828 (2022)Â