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Speaker: Wei Chen, ETH Zurich

Abstract:

A central issue in the research of topological insulators is how to drive
the system into a topologically nontrivial state such that its intriguing
properties, for instance the chiral edge current or Majorana fermions, can
be exploited. The phase transition into the topologically nontrivial state
takes place when bulk bands are inverted by tuning some material parameters.
We reveal that several intriguing aspects in statistical physics in fact also
manifest in topological phase transitions, although they are previously thought
to be unrelated. These aspects include renormalization group, scale invariance,
scaling laws, critical exponents, correlation function, and universality class,
the understanding of which opens a new direction of research in topological
insulators.