Topological Insulators: Fundamentals and Perspectives

Book Preface

The emerging field of topological insulators has changed our view to condensed matter systems and particularly to electronic materials as it has brought a new classification paradigm. After several years of research in this field, this book aims at providing an introduction to topological insulators from both theoretical and experimental perspectives, including basic techniques to characterize the unique properties of topological insulators. This book serves as an introduction as well as a reference to the field for newcomers or experienced researchers, by providing essential information about fundamentals and descriptive details on topological materials, structures, and electronic structure simulations.

This book is structured into three parts starting with a general introduction and the description of key experiments (Part 1: Fundamentals), proceeding with descriptions of electronic properties of specific realizations of topological insulators in various forms, with details on how to extract them from experiment and how to simulate them theoretically (Part 2: Electronic Structure), and finally showing the transport phenomena specific to topological insulators or imposed by nanostructuring and/or material quality (Part 3: Growth and Transport Phenomena).

We would like to thank all the authors to provide their unique viewto a hopefully broad audience.With their dedication, they have been instrumental for the success of this book project.We would like to thank the team atWiley (M. Preuß and M. Graf-Utzmann) for their support.

We gratefully acknowledge the following funding agencies that provided support throughout the period of emergence of the book. F.O. would like to acknowledge the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financial support (OR 349/1-1). S.R. acknowledges the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) for funding (MAT2012-33911). S.O.V. acknowledges partial support from the European Research Council under grant agreement 308023 SPINBOUND and from MINECO (MAT2013-46785-P). S.R. and S.O.V acknowledge support from the Severo Ochoa Program (MINECO SEV-2013-0295) and the “Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of Catalonia.”