Quantum Café is CCQ’s ongoing seminar series: open to all bona fide members of the greater NYC scientific community and held every second week, Quantum Café presents a series of informal, highly interactive talks, typically by external speakers, which present the most interesting recent developments and open questions in our field.
Title: Topological Kondo Insulators: Convergence of Chemical and Physical Intuition
Abstract: Correlated topological insulators, epitomized by SmB_6, combine elements of topology with strong electron correlations. Initially controversial, a series of definitive measurements have established the non-trivial topology in SmB6, and identified a range of observed phenomenology — including a sub-gap spin exciton, and an apparent Fermi surface (despite the putative insulating nature). In this talk, I will review the state of this field, including recent experimental and theoretical results derived from high level electronic structure studies of gas phase molecular units, and present a candidate model that explains all the observed physics, and the similar phenomenology that has recently been discovered in the related Kondo insulator YbB_12.