For a brief time in Portland, Oregon, this past spring, thousands of physicists moved from session to session at the annual March meeting of the American Physical Society (APS) on the lookout for the next big thing.
It was a talent search not unlike the one that unfolds every night in the bars and converted dance halls of Portland's famous music scene, where locals listen for the next big sound. The physicists' quest is a lot harder, though. Trends in music come and go, but the disciplines that dominate the APS March meeting--such as optics, electronics and condensed-matter physics--are rooted in the original theories of quantum mechanics, which were more-or-less completed in the 1930s. When it comes to describing how light and matter behave, only a few phenomena have emerged since then to become the physics equivalent of superstars.
At this year's APS meeting, however, the hallways were filled with talk of a promising newcomer--an eccentric class of materials known as topological insulators. The most striking characteristic of these insulators is that they conduct electricity only on their surfaces. The reasons are mathematically subtle--so much so that one physicist, Zahid Hasan of Princeton University in New Jersey, tried to explain the behavior using "simpler" concepts such as superstring theory. ("It's awfully beautiful stuff," he said reassuringly.) Yet the implications are rich, ranging from practical technology for quantum computing to laboratory tests of advanced particle physics.
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