20,104 research outputs found
Thermal fluctuations and anomalous elasticity of homogeneous nematic elastomers
We present a unified formulation of a rotationally invariant nonlinear
elasticity for a variety of spontaneously anisotropic phases, and use it to
study thermal fluctuations in nematic elastomers and spontaneously anisotropic
gels. We find that in a thermodynamic limit homogeneous nematic elastomers are
universally incompressible, are characterized by a universal ratio of shear
moduli, and exhibit an anomalous elasticity controlled by a nontrivial low
temperature fixed point perturbative in D=3-epsilon dimensions. In three
dimensions, we make predictions that are asymptotically exact.Comment: 4 RevTeX pgs,,submitted to Europhysics Letter
Quantum Hall Effect in Thin Films of Three-Dimensional Topological Insulators
We show that a thin film of a three-dimensional topological insulator (3DTI)
with an exchange field is a realization of the famous Haldane model for quantum
Hall effect (QHE) without Landau levels. The exchange field plays the role of
staggered fluxes on the honeycomb lattice, and the hybridization gap of the
surface states is equivalent to alternating on-site energies on the AB
sublattices. A peculiar phase diagram for the QHE is predicted in 3DTI thin
films under an applied magnetic field, which is quite different from that
either in traditional QHE systems or in graphene.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure
A topological look at the quantum spin Hall state
We propose a topological understanding of the quantum spin Hall state without
considering any symmetries, and it follows from the gauge invariance that
either the energy gap or the spin spectrum gap needs to close on the system
edges, the former scenario generally resulting in counterpropagating gapless
edge states. Based upon the Kane-Mele model with a uniform exchange field and a
sublattice staggered confining potential near the sample boundaries, we
demonstrate the existence of such gapless edge states and their robust
properties in the presence of impurities. These gapless edge states are
protected by the band topology alone, rather than any symmetries.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Probing spin entanglement by gate-voltage-controlled interference of current correlation in quantum spin Hall insulators
We propose an entanglement detector composed of two quantum spin Hall
insulators and a side gate deposited on one of the edge channels. For an ac
gate voltage, the differential noise contributed from the entangled electron
pairs exhibits the nontrivial step structures, from which the spin entanglement
concurrence can be easily obtained. The possible spin dephasing effects in the
quantum spin Hall insulators are also included.Comment: Physics Letters A in pres
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