'Weak' Materials Offer Strong Possibilities for Electronics

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“The fundamental computing scale is now very limited,” he said. “For many applications, like weather forecasting and information encoding and decoding, today’s computers are way too slow. However, quantum computers have been proposed that would use the principles of quantum physics to compute exponentially faster than today’s computers. 

“Weak topological insulators could make quantum computing feasible.” 

As a theorist, Zhang used old-fashioned pencil and paper to construct the basis of his theory about the bismuth compounds. His postdoctoral researcher Dr. Cheng-Cheng Liu, the study’s lead author and now an assistant professor at Beijing Institute of Technology, then crunched specific numbers using high-speed supercomputers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center based at UT Austin. 

Zhang’s UT Dallas colleague, Dr. Bing Lv, assistant professor of physics, has made samples of bismuth iodide. 

“The next step will be to characterize the material to explore the unique properties that a weak topological insulator can offer to fundamental physics and to our everyday lives,” Zhang said. 

In addition to Zhang and Liu, other authors of the study are Dr. Jin-Jian Zhou at California Institute of Technology and Yugui Yao at Beijing Institute of Technology. 

The work at UT Dallas was primarily supported by University startup funds and the National Science Foundation through the Aspen Center for Physics and Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics.

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