Abstract: Dirac materials have been at the forefront of condensed matter research over the past decade following breakthroughs in graphene transport experiments. These materials host relativistic-like quasiparticles near the Dirac point at which the valence and conduction bands meet, leading to a variety of intriguing phenomena including many-body interaction effects that both resemble and strongly contrast with quantum electrodynamics. These and related phenomena can arise not only in graphene, but also in three-dimensional Dirac-Weyl semimetals, where both the charge and the velocity of quasiparticles get modified due to interactions. In the three-dimensional case, the existence of Dirac points is also predicted to give rise to topologically protected surface states and to exotic transport due to the chiral anomaly which has proven challenging to confirm experimentally. I will describe our efforts to reach a quantitative understanding of many-body phenomena and topological surface states, and to develop new detectable signatures of the chiral anomaly in Dirac-Weyl materials.
Bio: Prof. Barnes has been a member of the Physics faculty at Virginia Tech since 2015. Prior to that, he held a postdoctoral position at the University of Virginia and a senior research associate position in both the Joint Quantum Institute and the Condensed Matter Theory Center at the University of Maryland. He earned a doctoral degree in Physics from the University of California, San Diego in 2006.