Condensed Matter Seminars

Topological Insulators (TI) have been at the focus of immense theoretical and experimental studies in the past few years. They represent accessible topological phases, where time reversal symmetry plays a key role. These systems provide a platform for the emergence of many exciting physical phenomena, such as helical transport in one and two dimensions, physics of Dirac fermions and the formation of Majorana fermion states. While the theoretical understanding of these materials progresses, it is crucial that theorists make concrete proposals for simple and informative ways to detect all the properties attributed to them. In this talk I will describe our proposals for transport experiments, the most common way to probe physics in condensed matter systems. I will present a few interesting questions concerning the current challenges transport experiments in TI are facing, discuss which physical phenomena are yet to be confirmed, and suggest two experimental schemes meant to detect the physics of the surface states in both two and three dimensional TI.