In everyday life we experience that certain materials are do not conduct electricity, insulators like wood or diamond, while others are electrical conductors, like copper or gold.
In the last decades, researchers have found out that there is an intermediate possibility.
Certain materials can be insulating in their interior, while still conduct in their exterior, at their surfaces or edges. More surprisingly, the conduction in this materials, called topological insulators, is organized efficiently.
Electrons separate to move inside electronic highways, allowing a very efficient conduction. Researchers have shown that this behaviour is very robust, and possibly useful to design new electronic devices, including quantum computers.
However, most of the topological insulators we know are very well organized, clean crystals. This means that not only they are expensive to grow for technology, but also that our theories to describe them are limited to very ordered solids, or more generally, states of matter. In this project we want to go beyond this understanding by formulating theories of topological phases of matter in solids where the atomic arrangements are not nicely ordered, like in crystals. Amorphous materials, like glass in your windows, are cheap to grow, but we currently lack the theoretical mathematical modelling to understand whether topological phases can exist there. Understanding whether this is the case can help experimental scientists to design devices that are scalable for technology, while retaining the nice topological properties we are after.
The three goals of this ERC project are
1. Establishing a novel methodology to predict and classify novel topological insulators and metals in a large pool of amorphous materials.
2. Defining unaccounted for topological phases that require amorphous lattices to exist resulting in superior capabilities, with and without strong interactions.
3. Predicting the first amorphous topological superconductors.
