Topological insulators have generated a lot of interest in recent years because of their potential applications in quantum computing, spintronics and information processing.

The defining property of these materials is that their interior behaves as an electrical insulator while their surface behaves as an electrical conductor. In other words, electrons can only move along the material’s surface.

In some cases however, known as strongly correlated systems, the strong interactions between electrons cause this relatively simple picture to break down.

Understanding and modelling strongly correlated topological insulators, it turns out, is extremely challenging.

A team of researchers from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Sciences, China, have recently tackled this challenge by using a new approach employing fermionic tensor states.

Their framework notably reduces the number of parameters needed in numerical simulations. This should lead to a greatly improved computational efficiency when modelling these systems.

By combining their methods with advanced numerical techniques, the researchers expect to be able to overcome the challenges posed by strong interaction effects.

This will lead to a deeper understanding of the properties of strongly correlated systems and could also enable the discovery of new materials with exciting new properties.