Special CPM Seminar

Electronic Physics in Dirac materials: from Graphene to Topological insulators

Yong P. Chen

Purdue University

Graphene and topological insulators have both attracted strong recent interests in condensed matter physics. In graphene as well as on the surface of topological insulators, electrons can behave as massless Dirac fermions that mimic ultrarelativistic quantum particles, leading to a host of interesting electronic properties and application potentials in nanoelectronic devices. In this talk, I will describe a few experiments we did on graphene (focusing on synthetic graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition) and topological insulators (such as Bi₂Se₃, and Bi₂Te₂Se) that illustrate the key electronic properties of these “Dirac materials”, with both similarities and important differences.