CME Seminar - Thursday, May 3rd - Joel Moore, UC Berkeley

[Longbrake, Patricia]

Please join us for the CME Seminar on Thursday, May 3rd at 11:30am in the Smith Seminar Room presented by Joel Moore, UC Berkeley.

"New topologically ordered phases of condensed matter"

Much of condensed matter physics is concerned with understanding how different kinds of order emerge from interactions between a large number
of simple constituents.  Topological order has been known for three decades to occur in the quantum Hall effect of two-dimensional electron systems under extreme conditions.  A different kind of topological order was recently discovered following theoretical predictions in some three-dimensional materials, dubbed "topological insulators", in zero magnetic field. Spin-orbit coupling, an intrinsic property of all solids, drives the formation of the topological state.

This talk will explain what topological order means, how topological insulators were predicted and discovered, and how they realize the "axion electrodynamics" studied by particle physicists in the 1980s.  Connections to other fields and efforts to find strongly correlated topological insulators are discussed in closing.

Thank you,
Trisch
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