On chain models for contact electrification

An exact analytical model of charge dynamics for a chain of atoms with asymmetric hopping terms is presented. Analytic and numeric results are shown to give rise to similar dynamics in both the absence and presence of electron interactions. The chain model is further extended to the case of two atoms per cell (a perfect alloy system). This extension is further applied to contact electrification between two different atomic chains and the effect of increasing the magnitude of the contact transfer matrix element is studied.

External tuning of topological phase transitions induced by interaction driven mass renormalization

Electron-electron interactions can be useful for realizing new nontrivial topological phases of matter. Here, we show by means of a tight-binding model and mean field theory how electron-electron interactions can lead to a topological phase transition. By externally adding or removing electrons from the system a band inversion between two bands with dierent parity is induced. This leads to a topological nontrivial phase if spin-orbit coupling is present. Besides the toy-model illustrating this mechanism, we also propose SmB6 as a possible playground for experimentally realizing a topological phase transition by external tuning.