We propose solitons in a photonic topological insulator: self-localized wave packets forming topological edge states residing in the bulk of a nonlinear photonic topological insulator. These self-forming entities exhibit, despite being in the bulk, the property of unidirectional transport, similar to the transport their linear counterparts display on the edge of a topological insulator. In the ...

In correlated systems, intermediate states usually appear transiently across phase transitions even at the femtosecond scale. It therefore remains an open question how to determine these intermediate states-a critical issue for understanding the origin of their correlated behaviour. Here we report a surface coordination route to successfully stabilize and directly image an intermediate state in...

Silicon-based photoelectrodes for solar fuel production have attracted great interest over the past decade, with the major challenge being silicon's vulnerability to corrosion. A metal-insulator-semiconductor architecture, in which an insulator film serves as a protection layer, can prevent corrosion but must also allow low-resistance carrier transport, generally leading to a trade-off between ...

The major radiation of the sun can be roughly divided into three regions: ultraviolet, visible, and infrared light. Detection in these three regions is important to human beings. The metal-insulator-semiconductor photodetector, with a simpler process than the pn-junction photodetector and a lower dark current than the MSM photodetector, has been developed for light detection in these three regi...

We describe a new possible route to the metal-insulator transition in doped semiconductors such as Si:P or Si:B. We explore the possibility that the loss of metallic transport occurs through Mott localization of electrons into a quantum spin liquid state with diffusive charge neutral "spinon" excitations. Such a quantum spin liquid state can appear as an intermediate phase between the metal and...

Despite many years of experimental searches for a first-order Mott transition in crystalline-doped semiconductors, none have been found. Extensive experimental work has characterized a first-order metal-insulator transition in Li(x)CoO(2), the classic material for rechargeable Li batteries, with a metallic state for x < 0.75 and insulating for x > 0.95. Using density functional theory calculati...

The inspection of high voltage power lines is an important task in order to prevent failure of the transmission system. In this work, we present a novel approach to detect insulators in aerial images and to analyze them automatically for possible faults. Our detection algorithm is based on discriminative training of local gradient-based descriptors and a subsequent voting scheme for localizatio...

Thin films of Al2O3 have been deposited on ITO-coated glass substrates by a sol-gel dipcoat process. Aluminium isopropoxide (Al(OC3H7)3) was used as the Al source material. X-ray diffraction measurements show that these films are amorphous. Scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy images of the films have revealed a relatively flat surface with no cracks. The dielectric properti...

We propose a simple realization of the three-dimensional (3D) Weyl semimetal phase, utilizing a multilayer structure, composed of identical thin films of a magnetically doped 3D topological insulator, separated by ordinary-insulator spacer layers. We show that the phase diagram of this system contains a Weyl semimetal phase of the simplest possible kind, with only two Dirac nodes of opposite ch...

We study the behavior of several physical properties of the Haldane model as the system undergoes its transition from the normal-insulator to the Chern-insulator phase. We find that the density matrix has exponential decay in both insulating phases, while having a power-law decay, more characteristic of a metallic system, precisely at the phase boundary. The total spread of the maximally locali...