Credit: Masaki Uchida
Scientists at Tokyo Institute of Technology experimentally verify the existence of exotic surface conduction states in topological semimetals (TSMs), materials that lie at the boundary between conductors and insulators, by performing voltage scans of these surface states on a thin film sample of a TSM. The findings can pave the way for future study and exploitation of such conduction states in realizing novel, quantum transport phenomena.
All of us are probably familiar with the idea of conductors and insulators. But what would you call a material that can conduct on the surface but insulate on the inside? Physicists call it a "topological insulator" (TI), a term that highlights the geometric aspect of its strange conduction behavior. Even stranger than TIs are "topological semimetals" (TSMs)-- bizarre materials that straddle the boundary between metals (conductors) and insulators.