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TOPOLOGICAL MATERIALS

Large curvature near a small gap

Nature Physics (2022)Cite this article

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The appearance of small local gaps in the electronic band structure of a topological semimetal is attributed to a hidden quasi-symmetry that produces a large Berry curvature.

Symmetries are a crucial concept in physics, and particularly in topological band structures where their presence can enforce that two bands must cross each other — become degenerate — in a certain region of reciprocal space. Now, writing in Nature Physics, Chunyu Guo and collaborators introduce the notion of hidden quasi-symmetries, which instead describes regions where two bands come close to each other but do not cross, and where there may be a large Berry curvature1.

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Fig. 1: Non-trivial Berry phase despite a gap.

Christoph Hohmann.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Physik-Department, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

    Marc A. Wilde & Christian Pfleiderer

  2. Centre for Quantum Engineering (ZQE), Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

    Marc A. Wilde & Christian Pfleiderer

  3. MCQST, Technical University of Munich, Garching, Germany

    Christian Pfleiderer

Authors
  1. Marc A. Wilde
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  2. Christian Pfleiderer
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Marc A. Wilde or Christian Pfleiderer.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests, but participated in the study reported in ref. 9.

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Wilde, M.A., Pfleiderer, C. Large curvature near a small gap. Nat. Phys. (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01623-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-022-01623-x

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