We propose a scheme based on topological insulators to generate Kramers pairs of Majorana fermions or parafermions in the complete absence of magnetic fields. Our setup consists of two topological insulators whose edge states are brought close to an s-wave superconductor. The resulting proximity effect leads to an interplay between a nonlocal crossed Andreev pairing, which is dominant in the st...

The detection of hydrophobicity is an important way to evaluate the performance of composite insulators, which is helpful to the safe operation of composite insulators. Image processing technology is used to judge the hydrophobicity of composite insulators, which makes detection results more accurate and overcomes the subjective drawbacks of traditional detection methods. As the traditional Can...

Strongly correlated insulators are broadly divided into two classes: Mott-Hubbard insulators, where the insulating gap is driven by the Coulomb repulsion U on the transition-metal cation, and charge-transfer insulators, where the gap is driven by the charge-transfer energy Δ between the cation and the ligand anions. The relative magnitudes of U and Δ determine which class a material belongs to,...

In this work, additional input is provided into the ongoing discussion on the mechanisms, causes and remedies of brittle fracture failures of composite (non-ceramic) insulators. This has been done partially to complement the recently published article on this topic entitled “ IEEE Task Force Report: Brittle Fracture in Non-Ceramic Insulators” [1]. At first, the most important characteristics of...

Retroviral vector gene therapy is a promising approach to treating HIV-1. However, integrated vectors are mutagens with the potential to dysregulate nearby genes and cause severe adverse side effects. Leukemia has already been a documented severe adverse event in gene therapy clinical trials for the treatment of primary immunodeficiencies. These side effects will need to be reduced or avoided i...

The classification of materials into insulators and conductors has been shaken up by the discovery of topological insulators that conduct robustly at the edge but not in the bulk. In mechanics, designating a material as insulating or conducting amounts to asking if it is rigid or floppy. Although mechanical structures that display topological floppy modes have been proposed, they are all vulner...

The quantum spin Hall insulators predicted ten years ago and now experimentally observed are instrumental for a break- through in nanoelectronics due to non-dissipative spin-polarized electron transport through their edges. For this transport to persist at normal conditions, the insulators should possess a sufficiently large band gap in a stable topological phase. Here, we theoretically show th...

In order to study the effects of strong magnetic field on Kondo insulators, we calculate magnetization curves and single-particle excitation spectra of the periodic Anderson model at half-filling under finite magnetic field by using the self-consistent second-order perturbation theory combined with the local approximation which becomes exact in the limit of infinite spatial dimensions. Without ...

As a topological insulator, the quantum Hall (QH) effect is indexed by the Chern and spin-Chern numbers C and Cspin. We have only Cspin = 0 or ± 1/2 in conventional QH systems. We investigate QH effects in generic monolayer honeycomb systems. We search for spin-resolved characteristic patterns by exploring Hofstadter's butterfly diagrams in the lattice theory and fan diagrams in the low-energy ...