Twists in the Tale of Topological Insulators
Time: 2021-11-08
Published By: He Liu
Speaker(s): Guo Chuan Thiang (BICMR)
Time: 15:15-17:00 November 17, 2021
Venue: Room 29, Quan Zhai, BICMR
I will provide some analytic background underlying the use of modern topology to discuss phases of matter in physics (Nobel Prize 2016). It sounds impossible, but a "topological" insulator turns into a "topological metal" at its boundary, and this paradoxical behaviour survives a large variety of perturbations. Mathematically, this behaviour arises by twisting Schrodinger operators, and discovering that their spectra has "topologically-protected'' features using index theoretic methods. The geometric-analytic ingredients will be presented in the concrete case of quantum Hall systems (Nobel Prize 1985).
