Colloquia

Dirac Materials

Recently a new single layer material — graphene has been discovered. This is a material where Dirac points in the fermionic spectrum lead to a very unusual properties, such as transport properties and impurity states. I will argue that these properties are not unique to graphene and in fact are a direct consequence of Dirac spectrum in fermionic excitation sector. Strong similarities with d-wave superconductors, superfluid 3He and with other materials exhibiting Dirac electronic spectrum are suggestive and offer a unifying perspective. I will argue that this discovery signifies the emergence of a new class of materials, that can be called **Dirac Materials**, the class where nontirivial properties emerge as a direct consequence of Dirac spectrum of excitations.