Mesoporous semimetal bismuth film and magnetic metal nickel and cobalt thin films have been electrodeposited from hexagonal or lamellar structured lyotropic liquid crystalline phases with polyoxyethylene surfactant. The liquid crystalline templates are characterized by low-angle X-ray diffraction (XRD) and polarized-light optical microscopy (POM). The metal films are characterized by low-angle ...

To clarify controversial structures and phase stability in the Li-B system, we predicted energetically favorable compounds and crystal structures of the Li-B binary system at ambient pressure, mainly including Li6B5, LiB2, and LiB3, from ab initio evolutionary structure simulations and further investigated physical properties of stable Li-B compounds using first-principles methods. Metallic Li6...

We report an optical spectroscopy study on the newly discovered superconductor Cu0.07TiSe2. Consistent with the development from a semimetal or semiconductor with a very small indirect energy gap upon doping TiSe2, it is found that the compound has a low carrier density. Most remarkably, the study reveals a substantial shift of the screened plasma edge in reflectance towards high energy with de...

The magnetotransport properties of epitaxial films of Cd_{3}As_{2}, a paradigm three-dimensional Dirac semimetal, are investigated. We show that an energy gap opens in the bulk electronic states of sufficiently thin films and, at low temperatures, carriers residing in surface states dominate the electrical transport. The carriers in these states are sufficiently mobile to give rise to a quantiz...

We study a superlattice of silicene and hexagonal boron nitride by first principles calculations and demonstrate that the interaction between the layers of the superlattice is very small. As a consequence, quasi free-standing silicene is realized in this superlattice. In particular, the Dirac cone of silicene is preserved. Due to the wide band gap of hexagonal boron nitride, the superlattice re...

Topological physics and strong electron-electron correlations in quantum materials are typically studied independently. However, there have been rapid recent developments which topological phase transitions emerge when the single-particle band structure is modified by interactions. We here demonstrate that room-temperature of (TaSe$_4$)$_2$I a Weyl semimetal with 24 pairs nodes. Owing to its qu...

A bstract We study an improved holographic model for the strongly coupled nodal line semimetal which satisfies duality relation between rank two tensor operators $$ \overline{\psi}{\gamma}^{\mu v}\psi ψ ¯ γ μv a...

Recent experiment has uncovered semimetal bismuth (Bi) as an excellent electrical contact to monolayer MoS$_2$ with ultralow resistance. The physics of the broader semimetal/monolayer-semiconductor family beyond Bi/MoS$_2$, however, remains largely unexplored thus far. Here we perform a comprehensive first-principle density functional theory investigation on properties between six archetypal tw...