Single particle Green's functions and topological insulators

Date

Mar 30, 2011

Time

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Speaker

Victor Gurarie

Affiliation

Boulder - USA

Language

en

Main Topic

Physik

Other Topics

Physik

Host

Condensed Matter Seminar

Description

Topological insulators are noninteracting gapful fermionic systems which have gapless boundary excitations. They are characterized by topological invariants. The topological invariants can be written in many different ways, including in terms of the Green’s functions. We show that the existence of the edge states directly follows, and can be derived by simple manipulations, from the existence of the topological invariant written in terms of the Green’s functions, for all types of topological insulators in all spacial dimensions. At the same time, the same procedure explains why topological insulators, once the interactions are turned on, can lose their edge states.

Last modified: Mar 30, 2011, 9:35:35 AM