In this paper,a brief review of the history of topological insulators is given.After that,electronic transport experiments in topological insulator-superconductor hybrid structures,including experimental methods,physical properties and seemingly contradictory observations are discussed.Additionally,some new topological insulator hybrid structures are proposed.
Weyl fermion is a massless Dirac fermion with definite chirality,which has been long pursued since 1929.Though it has not been observed as a fundamental particle in nature,Weyl fermion can be realized as low-energy excitation around Weyl point in Weyl semimetal,which possesses Weyl fermion cones in the bulk and nontrivial Fermi arc states on the surface. As a firstly discovered Weyl semimetal,Ta As crystal possesses 12 pairs of Weyl points in the momentum space,which are topologically protected against small perturbations. Here,we report for the first time the tip induced superconductivity on Ta As crystal by point contact spectroscopy. The zero bias conductance peak as well as a conductance plateau with double conductance peaks and sharp double dips are observed in the point contact spectra simultaneously,indicating unconventional superconductivity. Our further theoretical study suggests that the induced superconductivity may have nontrivial topology. The present work opens a new route in investigating the novel superconducting states based on Weyl materials.
He WangHuichao WangYuqin ChenJiawei LuoZhujun YuanJun LiuYong WangShuang JiaXiong-Jun Liujian WeiJian Wang
Ultra-cold atomic gases provide a new chance to study the universal critical behavior of phase transition. We study theoretically the matter wave interference for ultra-cold Bose gases in the critical regime. We demonstrate that the interference in the momentum distribution can be used to extract the correlation in the Bose gas. A simple relation between the interference visibility and the correlation length is found and used to interpret the pioneering experiment about the critical behavior of dilute Bose gases [Science 315 1556（2007）]. Our theory paves the way to experimentally study various types of ultra-cold atomic gases with the means of matter wave interference.
The last several years have witnessed the rapid developments in the study and understanding of topological insulators. In this review, after a brief summary of the history of topological insulators, we focus on the recent progress made in transport experiments on topological insulator films and nanowires. Some quantum phenomena, including the weak antilocalization, the Aharonov-Bobm effect, and the Shubnikov-de Haas oscillations, observed in these nanostructures are described. In addition, the electronic transport evidence of the superconducting proximity effect as well as an anomalous resistance enhancement in topological insulator/superconductor hybrid structures is included.
We present a general method for constructing maximally localized Wannier functions. It consists of three steps： （i） picking a localized trial wave function, （ii） performing a full band projection, and （iii） orthonormalizing with the LSwdin method. Our method is capable of producing maximally localized Wannier functions without further minimization, and it can be applied straightforwardly to random potentials without using supercells. The effectiveness of our method is demonstrated for both simple bands and composite bands.
The temperature dependence of lattice constants is studied by using first-principles calculations to determine the effects of in-plane stiffness and charge transfer on the thermal expansions of monolayer semiconducting transition metal dichalcogenides.Unlike the corresponding bulk material,our simulations show that monolayer MX2（M = Mo and W;X = S,Se,and Te） exhibits a negative thermal expansion at low temperatures,induced by the bending modes.The transition from contraction to expansion at higher temperatures is observed.Interestingly,the thermal expansion can be tailored regularly by alteration of the M or X atom.Detailed analysis shows that the positive thermal expansion coefficient is determined mainly by the in-plane stiffness,which can be expressed by a simple relationship.Essentially the regularity of this change can be attributed to the difference in charge transfer between the different elements.These findings should be applicable to other two-dimensional systems.
Few-layer graphene grown on Ni thin films has been studied by scanning tunneling microscopy. In most areas on the surfaces, moir6 patterns resulted from rotational stacking faults were observed. At a bias lower than 200 mV, only one sublattice shows up in regions without moir6 patterns while both sublattices are seen in regions with moir6 pattens. This phenomenon can be used to identify AB stacked regions. The scattering characteristics at various types of step edges are different from those of monolayer graphene edges, either armchair or zigzag.
Liquid helium 4 had been the only bosonic superfluid available in experiments for a long time. This situation was changed in 1995, when a new superfluid was born with the realization of the Bose-Einstein condensation in ultracold atomic gases. The liquid helium 4 is strongly interacting and has no spin; there is almost no way to change its parameters, such as interaction strength and density. The new superfluid, Bose-Einstein condensate （BEC）, offers various advantages over liquid helium. On the one hand, BEC is weakly interacting and has spin degrees of freedom. On the other hand, it is convenient to tune almost all the parameters of a BEC, for example, the kinetic energy by spin--orbit coupling, the density by the external potential, and the interaction by Feshbach resonance. Great efforts have been devoted to studying these new aspects, and the results have greatly enriched our understanding of superfluidity. Here we review these developments by focusing on the stability and critical velocity of various superfluids. The BEC systems considered include a uniform superfluid in free space, a superfluid with its density periodically modulated, a superfluid with artificially engineered spinorbit coupling, and a superfluid of pure spin current. Due to the weak interaction, these BEC systems can be well described by the mean-field Gross-Pitaevskii theory and their superfluidity, in particular critical velocities, can be examined with the aid of Bogoliubov excitations. Experimental proposals to observe these new aspects of superfluidity are discussed.
Zero resistance and Meissner effect are two crucial experimental evidences of superconductivity in determining a new kind of superconductor, which can be detected by transport and diamagnetic measurements. In this paper, we briefly review the main transport and magnetization results on the one unit cell （1-UC） FeSe films grown on SrTiO3 （STO） substrates from our team in recent years, which identify the high temperature superconductivity in 1-UC FeSe films.
