Department of Applied Physics Research Seminar: Maia G. Vergniory

Dr. Maia Garcia Vergniory is a Research Fellow at Ikerbasque (Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao) and the Donostia International Physics Center (Donostia-San Sebastian) in Spain.

Maia studies the electronic and magnetic properties of topological materials and topological phases. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including a L'OREAL Unesco Award for Women in Science in 2017 and she has published widely in the most prestigious journals. 

Google Scholar Profile

Seminar abstract:

Topological quantum chemistry (TQC) framework has provided a complete description of the universal properties of all possible atomic band insulators in all space groups considering the crystalline unitary symmetries.   It links the chemical and symmetry structure of a given material with its topological properties. While this formalism filled the gap between the mathematical classification and the practical diagnosis of topological materials, an obvious limitation is that it only applies to weakly interacting systems. It is an open question to which extent this formalism can be generalized to correlated systems that can exhibit symmetry protected topological Mott insulators. In this talk I will first introduce TQC and its application and then I will address this question by combining cluster perturbation theory and topological Hamiltonians within TQC. This simple formalism will be applied to calculate to the phase diagram of a representative model. The results are compared to numerically exact calculations from density matrix renormalization group and variational Monte Carlo simulations together with many-body topological invariants.

References

[1] M.G. Vergniory, L. Elcoro, C. Felser, N. Regnault, B.A. Bernevig, Z. Wang , “A complete catalogue of HighQuality Topological Materials “, Nature 566, 480-485 (2019)

[2] B. Bradlyn, L. Elcoro, J. Cano, M.G. Vergniory, Z. Wang, C. Felser, M.I. Aroyo, B.A. Bernevig, “Topological quantum chemistry”, Nature 547 (7663), 298-305 (2017).

[3] Mikel Iraola, Niclas Heinsdorf, Apoorv Tiwari, Dominik Lessnich, Thomas Mertz, Francesco Ferrari, Mark H Fischer, Stephen M Winter, Frank Pollmann, Titus Neupert, Roser Valentí, Maia G Vergniory, arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.04135

[4] Dominik Lessnich, Stephen M Winter, Mikel Iraola, Maia G Vergniory, Roser Valentí, arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.02624

Host: Prof. Jose Lado (Department of Applied Physics)

Zoom link available on request to [email protected].

Everybody interested welcome to attend!