The birth of topological insulators

Moore, Joel E.

¹Department of Physics, 366 Le Conte #7300, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
²Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.

Published online 10 March 2010

I have benefited from conversations about topological insulators with L. Balents, B. A. Bernevig, A. Essin, M. Franz, D. Haldane, Z. Hasan, C. Kane, D.-H. Lee, A. Ludwig, L. Molenkamp, S. Ryu, D. Vanderbilt, A. Vishwanath, X.-G. Wen, C. Xu and S.-C. Zhang. My work on topological insulators is supported by the US National Science Foundation.

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Nature 464(7286):p 194-198, March 11, 2010. | DOI: 10.1038/nature08916

Certain insulators have exotic metallic states on their surfaces. These states are formed by topological effects that also render the electrons travelling on such surfaces insensitive to scattering by impurities. Such topological insulators may provide new routes to generating novel phases and particles, possibly finding uses in technological applications in spintronics and quantum computing.