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Examples include rubber-like polymers and most plastics which can be thermoset or thermoplastic in nature. Insulators are used in electrical equipment to support and separate electrical conductors without allowing current through themselves. An insulating material used in bulk to wrap electrical cables or other equipment is called insulation.
Thermal insulation is the reduction of heat transfer (i.e., the transfer of thermal energy between objects of differing temperature) between objects in thermal contact or in range of radiative influence. Thermal insulation can be achieved with specially engineered methods or processes, as well as with suitable object shapes and materials.
Mott insulators are a class of materials that are expected to conduct electricity according to conventional band theories, but turn out to be insulators (particularly at low temperatures). These insulators fail to be correctly described by band theories of solids due to their strong electron –electron interactions, which are not considered in ...
A topological insulator is an insulator for the same reason a "trivial" (ordinary) insulator is: there exists an energy gap between the valence and conduction bands of the material. But in a topological insulator, these bands are, in an informal sense, "twisted", relative to a trivial insulator. [ 4 ]
A thermal bridge is created when materials create a continuous path across a temperature difference, in which the heat flow is not interrupted by thermal insulation. Common building materials that are poor insulators include glass and metal. A building design may have limited capacity for insulation in some areas of the structure.
In semiconductors and insulators the two bands are separated by a band gap, while in conductors the bands overlap. A band gap is an energy range in a solid where no electron states can exist due to the quantization of energy. Within the concept of bands, the energy gap between the valence band and the conduction band is the band gap. [1]
Insulator is generally used to indicate electrical obstruction while dielectric is used to indicate the energy storing capacity of the material (by means of polarisation). A common example of a dielectric is the electrically insulating material between the metallic plates of a capacitor. The polarisation of the dielectric by the applied ...
Since then, these materials as well as others exhibiting a transition between a metal and an insulator have been extensively studied, e.g. by Sir Nevill Mott, after whom the insulating state is named Mott insulator. The first metal-insulator transition to be found was the Verwey transition of magnetite in the 1940s. [3]