Jun 16, 2011
Princeton Center for Complex Materials (2014)
See how they run... electrons on the surface of a novel insulator
Dong-Xia Qu, Y. S. Hor, Jun Xiong, R. J. Cava and N. P. Ong, Princeton University
Novel electronic applications often result from fresh theoretical insights into long-familiar materials. Recently, strong interest has focused on the “topological insulators”, notably Bi2Se3and Bi2Te3. In these solids, the electrons on the surface display highly unusual properties. For example, they travel like massless particles (photons and neutrinos), and are much less susceptible to scattering by lattice imperfections. To date, much of the information on topological insulators has come from photoemission experiments and scanning tunneling microscopy.