While topological materials are not restricted to crystals, there is no efficient method to diagnose topology in non-crystalline solids such as amorphous materials. Here we introduce the structural spillage, a new indicator that predicts the unknown topological phase of a non-crystalline solid, which is compatible with first-principles calculations. We illustrate its potential with tight-binding and first-principles calculations of amorphous bismuth, predicting a bilayer to be a new topologically nontrivial material. Our work opens up the efficient prediction of non-crystalline solids via first-principles and high-throughput searches.
@article{arxiv.2301.02686,
title = {Structural spillage: an efficient method to identify non-crystalline topological materials},
author = {Daniel Muñoz-Segovia and Paul Corbae and Dániel Varjas and Frances Hellman and Sinéad M. Griffin and Adolfo G. Grushin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.02686},
year = {2023}
}