Seminarium Fizyki Materii Skondensowanej

Gapped materials can possess unique topological properties and robustpropagating states at their boundaries. The associated transportproperties allow fascinating new electronic and spintronic devices.Recently, a new class of spin-polarized edge states has beendiscovered in the so-called topological insulators. However, probingthese edge states through transport has proved to be challenging. Weexplore the properties of a material that has been proposed recently:a graphene layer with a random deposition of Indium adatoms at itssurface. While this system is, by construction, very disordered, wefind that it exhibits an extremely stable topological quantum spinHall phase with no signature of the spatial inhomogeneities of theadatom configuration. This robustness opens the route to a much easierexperimental realization of this topological phase. We additionallyfind this material to be a very promising candidate for thermopowergeneration with a target temperature tunable from 1 to 80 K and anefficiency ZT close to one.