What will it take to make our electronics smarter, faster, and more resilient? One idea is to build them from materials that are topological.
Topology stems from a branch of mathematics that studies shapes that can be manipulated or deformed without losing certain core properties. A donut is a common example: If it were made of rubber, a donut could be twisted and squeezed into a completely new shape, such as a coffee mug, while retaining a key trait—namely, its center hole, which takes the form of the cup's handle. The hole, in this case, is a topological trait, robust against certain deformations.
In recent years, scientists have applied concepts of topology to the discovery of materials with similarly robust electronic properties. In 2007, researchers predicted the first electronic topological insulators—materials in which electrons that behave in ways that are "topologically protected," or persistent in the face of certain disruptions.
Since then, scientists have searched for more topological materials with the aim of building better, more robust electronic devices. Until recently, only a handful of such materials were identified, and were therefore assumed to be a rarity.
Now researchers at MIT and elsewhere have discovered that, in fact, topological materials are everywhere, if you know how to look for them.
In a paper published in Science, the team, led by Nicolas Regnault of Princeton University and the École Normale Supérieure Paris, reports harnessing the power of multiple supercomputers to map the electronic structure of more than 96,000 natural and synthetic crystalline materials. They applied sophisticated filters to determine whether and what kind of topological traits exist in each structure.
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