Seminar

Dirac Materials

A .V. Balatsky
LANL
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Higgins 335D, 10 am

Recently, a new single layer material – graphene – has been discovered.  This is a material where Dirac points in the fermionic spectrum lead to a very unusual properties, such as transport properties and impurity states. I will argue that these properties are not unique to graphene and, in fact, are a direct consequence of Dirac spectrum in fermionic excitation sector.  Strong similarities with d-wave superconductors, superfluid ³He and with other materials exhibiting Dirac electronic spectrum are suggestive and offer a unifying perspective. I will argue that this discovery signifies the emergence of a new class of materials, that can be called **Dirac Materials**, the class where nontrivial properties emerge as a direct consequence of Dirac spectrum of excitations.