Special Condensed Matter Seminar: Mapping the spin texture of topological insulators with spin, energy, momentum and time resolution

Abstract:

The helical spin texture of surface electrons in topological insulator has attracted a great deal of interest in the past few years. Although this texture was predicted with the discovery of topological insulators and experimentally confirmed in in few points in the momentum space, its full experimental verification has been non trivial because of the low efficiency of spin resolved experiments. In this talk I will present new results on a , Bi2Se3 topological insulator, obtained by using an innovative ultra-high efficiency spin-resolved photoemission instrument, which provide a complete mapping of the spin texture of these electrons both in momentum and time space. I will show that the spin texture of photoelectrons can be fully manipulated by light and how this manipulation evolves as a function of time, paving the way of use of these materials for spintronics applications.