CATS Colloquium by Anton Burkov

One of the major themes of the modern condensed matter physics is the study of materials with nontrivial electronic structure topology. Particularly significant progress in this field has happened within the last decade, due to the discovery of topologically nontrivial states of matter, that have a gap in their energy spectrum, namely Topological Insulators and Topological Superconductors. In this talk Anton describes the most recent work, partly his own, extending the notions of the nontrivial electronic structure topology to gapless states of matter as well, namely to semimetals and even metals. He discusses both the theoretical concepts, and the recent experimental work, realizing these novel states of condensed matter.

Anton Burkov received his undergraduate education at Saint-Petersburg State Technical University in Russia. He got his PhD at Indiana University in 2002 and had held two postdoctoral appointments after that: at University of California, Santa Barbara and Harvard University. In 2007 he started as an Assistant Professor at University of Waterloo in Canada and is now a full Professor there. He is best known for his work on topological semimetals, where he has made some pioneering contributions.