TUESDAY 11:45
LIGHT, SPIN-ORBIT AND DEFORMATIONS TO CONTROL THE TOPOLOGICAL PROPERTIES OF NEW MATERIALS
Alexander López
Escuela Politécnica del Litoral, Ecuador
ABSTRACT
The 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was granted to J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz "for theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter". In principle, topology is a rather abstract subject in Mathematics; however, in the physical realm, we could understand this idea by saying that when a given material possesses a property that is “topological” this implies that such quantity does not depend on the geometrical configuration of the sample or that the property is preserved, even when the material is subject to a given amount of impurities. From the technological point of view, some of these topological properties might imply non dissipative energy transfer which could impact the quality of the electronics we currently used in our everyday`s life. From a technical point of view, the initial proposals where based on static interactions; yet, in 2011 there were some works concerning the role of periodically driven interactions in altering the topological properties of novel materials, such as graphene. In this talk, I will present some of our interesting recent results on the optical and mechanical manipulation of the electronic properties of monolayer graphene and silicene and discuss their possible future implications on electronic nanostructures.