Most materials in nature have at least one topological state.

The topology is a physical property of some materials that is distinguished by unusually robust states, which cause electronic properties of their exposed surfaces and edges are insensitive to local disturbances.

This intrinsic invariance makes topological materials excellent candidates for observing effects such as current interconversion electricity and electron spin, or to simulate exotic theories of high-energy physics, and even, under the right conditions, to store and manipulate quantum information. The potential of topological materials is enormous.

But until recently only a handful of topological materials had been discovered through chemical intuition, and topological electronic states were regarded as a needle in a haystack.

Now, an international scientific team led by Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) and Princeton University (USA) found that almost all materials in nature have at least one topological state, contrary to the 40-year-old assumption that topological materials are rare and exotic.

The study, in which the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), the Max Planck Institute (Germany), the École Normale Supérieure and the CNRS (France) and MIT (USA) also participate, has just been published in the journal Science.

using a computational model performance, the authors found that more than half of the 3D materials known in nature are topological and that 88% harbor topological latent states.

The team performed comprehensive high-throughput calculations to look for topological states in the electronic structures of the 96,196 crystalline materials existing in the international repository where all the materials studied experimentally are registered. This enormous task required more than 25 million hours of calculation.

Through a combined chemical and topological analysis, the team grouped the electronic structures in about 38,000 topological materials and made them available to the scientific community through the database. Topological materials database. All of this represents the culmination of the efforts the team has made over the past six years in developing the new position-space theory in topological bands known as topological quantum chemistry.

supertopological materials

In addition to finding topological properties in almost all materials, the researchers discovered some extreme cases of topology across the entire energy spectrum, introducing the new concept of supertopological in the so-called theory of band topology.

“Looking at our data, we surprisingly saw that certain materials have topological properties everywhere,” points out the first author, Maia Garcia-Vergnioryresearcher at DIPC and the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids.

Our results indicate that topology is a fundamental property of matter that has been neglected until now, and that there are certain materials with topological properties everywhere.

Maia Garcia-Vergniory (DIPC)

The team found that the 2% of known materials are supertopological, that is, all electronic bands are topological. Among the materials with ignored supertopology is the bismuthone of the most studied solid-state materials historically.

“Our results indicate that topology is a fundamental property of matter that has been neglected until now”, concludes García-Vergniory.

The ubiquity of topological features observed in numerical simulations suggests that experimental features of topological states should have already been observed in previous investigations of many materials.

The team, after analyzing data from previous photoemission experiments, found this to be the case. For example, in some previous experimental studies, the authors observed unexplained surface resonanceswhich in the current study were recognized as neglected surface topological states.

“The evidence has always been there,” the authors write. We now have a concrete key to deciphering all surface features in spectroscopic material experiments. Our data base is very powerful and comfortable tool. If I’m interested in a topological property, the database immediately tells me which are the best candidates. So I just have to synthesize the samples in my lab, no more guesswork.”

“Reviewing past experiments with a fresh perspective is an amazing first step,” he adds. Andrey Bernevigfrom Princeton University and Visiting Professor Ikerbasque at DIPC, “but we can look to an even more exciting future where materials with advanced functionality are designed through a marriage of human intuition and artificial intelligence, built on topological material data and topological quantum chemistry”.

According to the researchers, a whole world of topological materials is opening up with possible extraordinary applicationssuch as building quantum computers or using energy more efficiently.