Niels Bohr Lecture by Yoichi Ando

Topological Insulators and Superconductors

Topological insulators and superconductors are new quantum states of matter that are characterized by nontrivial topological structures of the Hilbert space [1].

Recently, they attract a lot of attention because of the appearance of exotic quasiparticles such as spin-helical Dirac fermions or Majorana fermions on their surfaces, which hold promise for various novel applications [2].

In this talk, I will introduce the basics of those materials and present some of the key contributions we have made in this new frontier.

[1] Y. Ando, Topological Insulator Materials, J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 81, 102001 (2013).

[2] Y. Ando and L. Fu, Topological Crystalline Insulators and Topological Superconductors: From Concepts to Materials, Annu. Rev. Condens. Mater Phys. 6, 361 (2015).

• Wednesday, April 6, 2016 at 15:15 in Aud. 3 at HCØ.

About Dr. Yoichi Ando:

Dr. Yoichi Ando was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1964. He obtained B.Sc. (1987), M.Sc. (1989), and Ph.D. (1994) degrees from the University of Tokyo. He was a postdoc at Bell Laboratories in the US (1994-1996), and then led a research group at Central Research Institute of Electric Power Industry in Tokyo (1996-2007), where he eventually became a department head. He was appointed to a full professor in 2007 at Osaka University, and in 2015 he moved to the University of Cologne as a W3 professor of experimental physics.

According to the Web of Science, his h-index is currently 59. For his seminal contributions to the fields of high-temperature superconductivity and topological materials, he received Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Prize in 2006, Superconductivity Science and Technology Award in 2003 and in 2013, Inoue Prize for Science in 2014, and Osaka Science Prize in 2014. He is one of the Highly Cited Researchers in Physics selected by Thomson Reuters in 2014.