Chemical Principles of Topological Semimetals

TL;DR

This review explains the chemical principles behind topological semimetals, highlighting their electronic structures, classes, key features, and potential applications to make the field accessible to materials scientists.

Contribution

It provides a chemical perspective on topological semimetals, detailing their electronic structures, classes, and how chemical principles enable their realization.

Findings

Classification of topological semimetals and their key features

Chemical principles underlying the electronic structures

Potential applications and properties of topological semimetals

Abstract

Initiated by the discovery of topological insulators, topologically non-trivial materials have attracted immense interest in the physics community in the past decade. One of the latest additions to the field, the material class of topological semimetals, has grown at an extremely fast rate . While the prototype of a topological semimetal, graphene, has been known for a while, the first 3D analogues of graphene have only been discovered recently. This review, written from a chemistry perspective, intends to make the growing field of topological semimetals accessible to the wider community of materials scientists and scholars from related disciplines. To this end, we describe key features of topological semimetals, embedded in their electronic structure, and how they can be achieved based on chemical principles. We introduce the different classes of topological semimetals and review their salient representatives. Finally, selected properties and potential applications of these materials are discussed.