https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-03598-3
Regular Article
Electromagnetic shielding induced by topological surface states
Instituto de Ciencias Nucleares, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 04510, Ciudad de México, México
b
alberto.martin@nucleares.unam.mx
Received:
11
November
2022
Accepted:
13
December
2022
Published online:
12
January
2023
In this paper we investigate the electromagnetic shielding of a bifilar transmission line composed of two parallel wires carrying opposite currents embedded in a layered cylinder. The core and the shell are made of either a conventional insulator or a topological insulator, both immersed in a dielectric fluid. The magnetoelectric response of the system is described by an effective field theory akin to axion electrodynamics. In the quasiestatic approximation, we solve for the electromagnetic fields in the whole space in an analytical fashion and obtain them as functions of the materials parameters (i.e., axion angle and frequency-dependent permittivity) and the thickness of the shell. As expected, high values of the axion angle favor the magnetic and electric shielding effects. Interestingly, when the core is made of a TI and the shell of a conventional dielectric, we determine precise values for the frequency at which the magnetic shielding is zero, even when the system in nonmagnetic. The price to pay is the generation of an electric field, proportional to the axion angle, due to the topological magnetoelectric effect. This makes TIs promising materials offering an alternative for novel shielding applications. The opposite configuration, TI shell and dielectric core, does not exhibit interesting shielding effects.
Supplementary Information The online version contains supplementary material available at https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-022-03598-3.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2023. Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
