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Achievements of IOP Selected As One of China's Top 10 Scientific and Technological Progress in 2019

Date:10-01-2020 Print

The list of China's top 10 sci-tech progress news, jointly selected by academicians from Chinese Academy of Sciences and Chinese Academy of Engineering, were announced in Beijing on January 11, 2020. The group of Researcher Fang Chen, Researcher Weng Hongming and Academician Fang Zhong from the Institute of Physics (IOP), together with the groups from Nanjing University and Princeton University, were selected for their independent research achievement that "recent research shows that about 24% of materials in nature may have topological structures".

In the small hours of February 28, 2019, three research groups from IOP, Nanjing University and Princeton University respectively published their findings in Nature.

Predicting the topological properties of specific materials often requires lots of specialized calculations by computational physics experts. The research group of IOP has developed a new method to automatically calculate the topological properties of materials. In principle, in order to obtain some or even all of the information about the topology invariants of the system, it is only needed to calculate the symmetry of the energy band of high symmetric points in the energy band of crystalline materials, which greatly simplifies the process of calculation. By this method, the group has found more than 8,000 topological materials out of nearly 40,000 materials, a dozen times as much topological material as has been found in the past decade, based on which they built an online database of topological electronic materials. It is the first time that so many new topological materials have been predicted at once, and their discovery in experiments and the research of physical properties will prompt a research rush in the field.

News link: http://news.sciencenet.cn/htmlnews/2020/1/434723.shtm

Further reading: http://www.iop.cas.cn/xwzx/kydt/201902/t20190228_5245995.html