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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Structural spillage: An efficient method to identify noncrystalline topological materials

Daniel Muñoz-Segovia1,2,*,†, Paul Corbae3,4,*, Dániel Varjas5,6, Frances Hellman3,4,7, Sinéad M. Griffin4,8,‡, and Adolfo G. Grushin2,§

  • 1Donostia International Physics Center, 20018 Donostia-San Sebastian, Spain
  • 2University Grenoble Alpes, CNRS, Grenoble INP, Institut Néel, 38000 Grenoble, France
  • 3Department of Materials Science, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 4Materials Sciences Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA
  • 5Department of Physics, Stockholm University, AlbaNova University Center, 106 91 Stockholm, Sweden
  • 6Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Nöthnitzer Strasse 38, 01187 Dresden, Germany
  • 7Department of Physics, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
  • 8Molecular Foundry Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †daniel.munozsegovia@dipc.org
  • ‡sgriffin@lbl.gov
  • §adolfo.grushin@neel.cnrs.fr
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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L042011 – Published 12 October, 2023

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevResearch.5.L042011

Abstract

While topological materials are not restricted to crystals, there is no efficient method to diagnose topology in noncrystalline solids such as amorphous materials. Here we introduce the structural spillage, a new indicator that predicts the unknown topological phase of a noncrystalline solid, which is compatible with first-principles calculations. We illustrate its potential with tight-binding and first-principles calculations of amorphous bismuth, predicting a bilayer to be a new topologically nontrivial material. Our work opens up the efficient prediction of noncrystalline solids via first-principles and high-throughput searches.

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Corrections

15 November, 2023

Correction: The footnote indicating equal contribution for the first two authors was missing at publication and has been inserted.

Article Text

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Phys. Rev. Research 5, L042011– Published 12 October, 2023
  • Received 23 February 2023
  • Revised 25 May 2023
  • Accepted 11 August 2023
  • Corrected 15 November 2023
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