Dynamical axion field in topological magnetic insulators
By Rundong Li, Jing Wang, Xiao-Liang Qi, Shoucheng Zhang. 2009
441 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Axions are weakly interacting particles of low mass, and were postulated more than 30 years ago in the framework of the Standard Model of particle physics. Their existence could explain the missing dark matter of the Universe. However, despite intensive searches, axions have yet to be observed. Here we show that magnetic fluctuations of topological insulators couple to the electromagnetic fields exactly like the axions, and propose several experiments to detect this dynamical axion field. In particular, we show that the axion coupling enables a nonlinear modulation of the electromagnetic field, leading to attenuated total reflection. We propose a new optical-modulator device based on this principle. Axions are hypothetical particles that might play an important part in particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. So far they have eluded observation, but theoretical work now predicts that axion physics might be explored in condensed-matter systems known as topological insulators.
Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2f8aefe4edd1659f7536f5c34f2b9047aeda9025
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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Citations in the corpus
- Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, background): “…(Fu and Kane 2008; Elliott and Franz 2015; Roy and Kallin 2008; Kitaev 2009; Schnyder et al. 2008), axions,(Essin, Moore, and Vanderbilt 2009; Li et al. 2010) magnetic monopoles, (Qi, Li, et al. 2009) fractional excitations (Wen 1995; Grushin et al. 2012; Li, Liu, et al. 2014; Teo and Kane…”
- Simplified Topological Invariants for Interacting Insulators (2012, background): “More recently, topological insulator with strong electron-electron interaction is becoming a central topic in the field [10–20].”