Phys.org April 2, 2024 Introducing electron correlations to a quantum spin Hall (QSH) insulator can lead to the emergence of a fractional topological insulator and other exotic time-reversal-symmetric topological order, not possible in quantum Hall and Chern insulator systems. An international team of researchers (USA – Boston College, Harvard University, UCLA, Texas A&M, University of Tennessee, MIT, Singapore, Japan, China, Canada) has found a new dual QSH insulator within the intrinsic monolayer crystal of TaIrTe4, arising from the interplay of its single-particle topology and density-tuned electron correlations. At charge neutrality, monolayer TaIrTe4 demonstrated the QSH insulator, manifesting enhanced nonlocal transport […]
Tag Archives: Topological phases
New method flips the script on topological physics
Science Daily January 25, 2024 The concept of topological phases is rather abstract, and the characterization of the spectral topology of mechanical structures has intrinsically relied on the a priori knowledge of idealized theoretical models. An international team of researchers (USA – University of Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, France) introduced and validated an experimental method to detect the topologically protected zero modes of mechanical structures without resorting to any modeling step. The method is based on a simple electrostatic analogy: Topological zero modes are akin to electric charges. To detect them, they identified elementary mechanical molecules and measured their chiral polarization. […]
Merons and antimerons
Science Daily April 11, 2023 Out-of-plane polar domain structures have recently been discovered in strained and twisted bilayers of inversion symmetry broken systems such as hexagonal boron nitride. An international team of researchers (Belgium, UK, USA – Harvard University) has shown that this symmetry breaking also gives rise to an in-plane component of polarization, and the form of the total polarization is determined purely from symmetry considerations. The in-plane component of the polarization makes the polar domains in strained and twisted bilayers topologically non-trivial, forming a network of merons and antimerons (half-skyrmions and half-antiskyrmions). For twisted systems, the merons are […]