Rutgers University Department of
Physics and Astronomy
PHYSICS 682, Spring 2020
Final projects
For your final project, I ask you to pick a topic related to the
course material, but not adequately covered in class. You should
identify one or a few references that you will read and base your
report on. Please provide a first indication of your project, with
a list of references, on the Homework #8 assignment due on April 13.
Your finished project should consist of two parts:
A written extended abstract
- This does not contain everything you learned, or that you
plan to talk about; it is more like an advertisement for your
oral presentation.
- It should be visually appealing, with a couple of figures
or sketches.
- I suggest to roughly follow the format in the following example:
The zip-file contains LaTeX source that you can use as a template
for your abstract. I encourage LaTeX, but if you use MSword, please
try to emulate the sample format.
An oral presentation
- I plan for each presentation to be
15 minutes with 10 minutes questions.
- Prepare a set of powerpoint
(or keynote, pdf, ...) slides, and be prepared to share your screen
for the presentation.
- The tentative dates for the presentations are Monday May 4 and
Wednesday May 6, starting at 1:40pm.
Suggested topics
The following list of suggested topics is far from complete; you
are encouraged to modify these suggestions, or come up with your
own ideas.
You may want to start by looking at the list of suggestions that
I made the last time I taught a version of this course in 2016,
which comes with suggested references:
Other and newer topics might include
- Crystalline topological insulators
- Mirror Chern insulators
- Axion insulators
- Symmetry indicators
- Band representation theory ("topological quantum chemistry")
- Spin Chern number
- Higher-order topological insulators
- Weyl semimetals
- Inversion-broken vs. TR-broken Weyl semimetals
- Fermi arc surface states and magnetic orbits in thin films
- Chiral anomaly and/or chiral magnetic effect
- Type-II Weyl points
- Topological superconductors
- Periodic table of topological insulators (Altland-Zirnbauer
classification)
I will probably add to this list as I think of other possibilities.
You can find references for some of these topics in the text. For
others, ask me for references.
