The book is mainly designed for post-graduate students to learn modern-day condensed matter physics. While emphasizing an experiment called the 'Quantum Hall effect', it introduces the subject of 'Topology' and how the topological invariants are related to the quantization of the Hall plateaus. Thus, the content tries to deliver an account of the topological aspects of materials that have shaped the study of condensed matter physics in recent times. The subject is often quite involved for a student to grasp the fundamentals and relate them to physical phenomena. Further, these topics are mostly left out of the undergraduate curriculum, although they often require a simplistic view of the concepts involved to be presented pedagogically. The book contains examples, worked-out concepts, important derivations, diagrams for illustration, etc. to aid the understanding of the students. The book also emphasizes the experimental discoveries that put the subject in its perspective and elaborate on the applications which are likely to be of interest to scientists and engineers.

Autorentext

Dr. Saurabh Basu is a Senior Professor in the Department of Physics at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Guwahati, India. Prof. Basu completed his Ph.D. from IIT Kanpur (1999) and M.Sc. from IIT Bombay (1993). He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Mumbai, and Queens University, Kingston, Canada. His research interest is theoretical condensed matter physics. His other interests include effective models in fermionic systems, quantum information theory applied to condensed matter physics, BCE-BEC crossover, etc. He has supervised 13 Ph.D. students. He is presently guiding 1 M.Tech. and 06 Ph.D. students. He has 100 research publications in peer-reviewed international journals to his credit. Prof. Basu has been Visiting Fellow at the University of Frankfurt, Germany; International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste, Italy; Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey; and Univ. Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.