CME Seminar - TODAY - Joel Moore, UC Berkeley - 11:30am, Smith Seminar Room

[Longbrake, Patricia]

Please join us at 11:30am today in the Smith Seminar Room for the CME Seminar presented by Joel Moore from UC Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

"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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