Inducing a Magnetic Monopole with Topological Surface States

By Xiao-Liang Qi, Rundong Li, J. Zang, Shoucheng Zhang. Science, 2008

786 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Existence of the magnetic monopole is compatible with the fundamental laws of nature; however, this elusive particle has yet to be detected experimentally. We show theoretically that an electric charge near a topological surface state induces an image magnetic monopole charge due to the topological magneto-electric effect. The magnetic field generated by the image magnetic monopole may be experimentally measured, and the inverse square law of the field dependence can be determined quantitatively. We propose that this effect can be used to experimentally realize a gas of quantum particles carrying fractional statistics, consisting of the bound states of the electric charge and the image magnetic monopole charge.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1e7ac25a815189f3fe4b8a94c19a4435176e0369

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

1. Y. Ando
2. M. Zahid Hasan
3. Hsin Lin
4. Arun Bansil
5. Claudia Felser
6. Shoucheng Zhang
7. Xiao-Liang Qi
8. Tanmoy Das

Citations in the corpus

• Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, background): “This can be done by considering a 2D slab of a 3D material or a 1D ribbon in 2D. (Fu, Kane, and Mele 2007; Fu and Kane 2007; Xia et al. 2009; Zhang, Liu, et al. 2009; Wang and Chiang 2014) Topological surface states must connect valence and conduction bands by crossing Fermi level (EF) an odd number”
• Spintronics and pseudospintronics in graphene and topological insulators. (2012, background): “A number of interesting magnetoelectric [49][73][74][75], and magneto-optical phenomena [70][76][77][78][79][80][81][82][83] are associated with weak time-reversal-symmetry breaking at the surface of a topological insulator.”
• Unexpected mass acquisition of Dirac fermions at the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator (2011, background): “It has been proposed theoretically that such a mass acquisition is necessary to realize novel topological phenomen”
• Discovery (theoretical prediction and experimental observation) of a large-gap topological-insulator class with spin-polarized single-Dirac-cone on the surface (2009, background): “The strong-topological-insulator phase contains surface states (SSs) with novel electromagnetic properties [7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15].”