Explore the course¶

Twelve weeks of explanations, expert videos, interactive figures, and questions. Follow the sequence or revisit a topic.

About the course¶

This is an open online course on topology in condensed matter. Initially developed for the edX platform in 2015, its development continues here.

Learning goals¶

After following this course, you will:

• Discover how topological concepts manifest in condensed matter systems

• Get an overview of different research directions and important developments

• Combine the relevant math with simulations and physical arguments to improve your understanding

Authors¶

The course was initiated and written by

• Anton Akhmerov (TU Delft)

• Jay Sau (University of Maryland)

• Bernard van Heck (Leiden University).

Most of the code was developed by TU Delft PhD students:

• Sebastian Rubbert

• Rafał Skolasiński

• Bas Nijholt

• Irfan Muhammad

• Tómas Örn Rosdahl

The course videos were generously contributed by multiple experts in the field:

• Yuval Oreg (Weizmann Institute of Science)

• Carlo Beenakker (Leiden University)

• Dganit Meidan (Ben Gurion University)

• Ady Stern (Weizmann Institute of Science)

• Bertrand Halperin (Harvard University)

• Xiao-Liang Qi (Stanford University)

• Duncan Haldane (Princeton University)

• Charles Kane (University of Pennsylvania)

• Michael Wimmer (TU Delft)

• Joel Moore (Berkeley University)

• David Vanderbilt (Rutgers University)

• Taylor Hughes (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

• Shinsei Ryu (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

• Fabian Hassler (RWTH Aachen)

• Piet Brouwer (Freie Universität Berlin)

• Alexander Altland (University of Cologne)

• Ashvin Vishwanath (University of California, Berkeley)

• Vincenzo Vitelli (Leiden University)

• Mark Rudner (Niels Bohr Institute)

• Liang Fu (MIT)

• Sankar Das Sarma (University of Maryland)

• Barbara Terhal (RWTH Aachen)

Acknowledgments¶

When working on the course, we greatly benefited from the support of:

• Delft University of Technology and its Extension School

• QuTech

• Casimir Research School and the NanoFront program

• University of Maryland and its Physics Department

• Joint Quantum Institute

We thank M. Wimmer and C. Groth for letting us use their code in some of the course materials.

For support with implementing the technical aspects of the course, we thank

• The Jupyter project and its developer team, especially Min Ragan-Kelley.

• SageMathCloud and its creator W. Stein.

• The Plotly community for the open-source plotting tools.

• The Executable books project, powering the current website.

Finally, we thank all the external speakers for contributing the course videos.