Electron Superhighway: a Quantum Leap for Computing

For the past 60 years, progress in information technology has been governed by Moore's law, which states that the number of transistors on a semiconductor chip doubles every 18 months. However,  this remarkable trend is drawing to a close, mostly because the electrons that carry current in chips move like cars driving through a crowded marketplace, swerving around obstacles and dissipating too much of their energy as heat. The recent discovery of a new state of matter "the  topological insulator" may  lead to a new paradigm of information processing, in which electrons moving in opposing directions are separated into well-ordered lanes, like automobiles on a highway. This talk will explain the basic principles behind this amazing discovery.

Speaker: Shoucheng Zhang