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Topological insulators

The next generation

Nature Physics volume 5, pages 378–380 (2009)Cite this article

Spin–orbit coupling in some materials leads to the formation of surface states that are topologically protected from scattering. Theory and experiments have found an important new family of such materials.

Topological insulators are materials with a bulk insulating gap, exhibiting quantum-Hall-like behaviour in the absence of a magnetic field. Such systems are thought to provide an avenue for the realization of fault-tolerant quantum computing because they contain surface states that are topologically protected against scattering by time-reversal symmetry. However, topological phases in condensed matter generally behave like 'hothouse flowers'; they are beautiful but fragile and, until now, were thought to be impossible to create without extremes of temperature and magnetic field. This conventional wisdom may be overturned by a pair of papers in this issue1,2, which show that a certain class of three-dimensional topological insulator material can have protected surface states and display other topological behaviour potentially up to room temperature without magnetic fields. On page 398, Zahid Hasan and colleagues1 report the observation of characteristic signatures of a topological insulator in the band structure of Bi2Se3 studied using angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and first-principles calculations. In contrast with previously studied materials, Bi2Se3 is shown to have a large bandgap and a single surface Dirac cone associated with the topologically protected state in the material. Concurrent theoretical work using electronic structure calculations, reported by Shou-Cheng Zhang and co-workers2 on page 438, shows that Bi2Se3 is in fact only one of an emerging class of new large-bandgap topological insulator, providing a simple tight-binding model to capture their physical properties. These results pave the way for the experimental realization and potential application of robust topological phases in a variety of materials.

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Figure 1: 'Light-like' electrons, protected by time-reversal symmetry, in topological insulators.

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  1. Joel Moore is in the Department of Physics, and the Materials Sciences Division, University of California, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA. jemoore@berkeley.edu,

    Joel Moore

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Moore, J. The next generation. Nature Phys 5, 378–380 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphys1294

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