Magnetoelectric polarizability and axion electrodynamics in crystalline insulators.

By A. Essin, J. Moore, D. Vanderbilt. Physical Review Letters, 2008

672 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The orbital motion of electrons in a three-dimensional solid can generate a pseudoscalar magnetoelectric coupling theta, a fact we derive for the single-particle case using a recent theory of polarization in weakly inhomogeneous materials. This polarizability theta is the same parameter that appears in the "axion electrodynamics" Lagrangian DeltaL_{EM}=(thetae;{2}/2pih)E.B, which is known to describe the unusual magnetoelectric properties of the three-dimensional topological insulator (theta=pi). We compute theta for a simple model that accesses the topological insulator and discuss its connection to the surface Hall conductivity. The orbital magnetoelectric polarizability can be generalized to the many-particle wave function and defines the 3D topological insulator, like the integer quantum Hall effect, in terms of a topological ground-state response function.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7ac6bbd4b80ea866f60c325a07890c0e1b9ed47

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Citations in the corpus

Roadmap on topological photonics (2022, background): “Nontrivial synthetic background potentials can also be inherited from electronic topological materials, for instance, when their optical response reveals an emergent axionic field [60].”
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.”
The physics of quantum materials (2017, background): “The 3D topological insulator supports a quantized magnetoelectric eﬀect 79,80 , which may have been observed in recent terahertz optical experiments 81 .”
Dynamical axion field in topological magnetic insulators (2009, methodology): “The θ parameter has been calculated explicitly for several basic models of topological insulator”
Gapped boundary phases of topological insulators via weak coupling (2016, background): “1) represents a contribution to the theta-angle of the electromagnetic field, which [19, 20] is θ = π inside a topological insulator assuming that it vanishes outside.”
Weyl and Dirac semimetals in three-dimensional solids (2017, methodology): “The action is Sθ = 1 2π e2 h ∫ dtdrθ(r, t)E ·B. (21) This is similar to the formalism used in describing the electromagnetic response of topological insulators (Essin et al., 2009; Qi et al., 2008; Wu et al., 2016).”
Colloquium : Topological band theory (2016, background): “…in the TIs (e.g., Majorana fermions (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;…”
Chemical Aspects of the Candidate Antiferromagnetic Topological Insulator MnBi2Te4 (2018, background): “A sizeable portion of the present research on topological materials([1]) is conducted in pursuit of candidate materials for the quantum anomalous Hall effect (QAHE)([2,3]) and the topological magnetoelectric effect.([4]) One of the most compelling prospects of topological phases is the manifestation”