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In 1994, an unconventional form of superconductivity was detected in strontium ruthenate. The discovery has shed light on the mechanism of unconventional superconductivity at high temperatures. "The great tragedy of Science [is] the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an [experimental] fact." - T.H. Huxley, Biogenesis and abiogenesis, (1884), 3 pages, 1 figure; In Retrospect - News and View; Historical commentary on the discovery of superconductivity in Sr2RuO4

It has been proposed that topological insulators can be best characterized not as surface conductors, but as bulk magnetoelectrics that -- under the right conditions-- have a universal quantized magnetoelectric response coefficient $e^2/2h$. However, it is not clear to what extent these conditions are achievable in real materials that can have disorder, finite chemical potential, residual dissipation, and even inversion symmetry. This has led to some confusion and misconceptions. The primary goal of this work is to illustrate exactly under what real life scenarios and in what context topological insulators can be described as magnetoelectrics. We explore analogies of the 3D magnetoelectric response to electric polarization in 1D in detail, the formal vs. effective polarization and magnetoelectric susceptibility, the 1/2 quantized surface quantum Hall effect, the multivalued nature of the magnetoelectric susceptibility, the role of inversion symmetry, the effects of dissipation, and the necessity for finite frequency measurements. We present these issues from the perspective of experimentalists who have struggled to take the beautiful theoretical ideas and to try to measure their (sometimes subtle) physical consequences in messy real material systems., 34 pages, 14 figures; very informal exposition on aspects of topological insulators as magnetoelectrics. Comments welcome. This version some references and a table added

Topological insulators (TI) are a phase of matter that host unusual metallic surface states. Unlike the states that exist on the surface of conventional materials, these so-called topological surfaces states (TSS) are protected against disorder-related localization effects by time reversal symmetry through strong spin-orbit coupling. By combining transport measurements, angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, and scanning tunneling microscopy, we show that there exists a critical level of disorder beyond which the TI $\mathrm{B}{\mathrm{i}}_{2}\mathrm{S}{\mathrm{e}}_{3}$ loses its ability to protect the metallic TSS and transitions to a fully insulating state. The absence of the metallic surface channels dictates that there is a change in the material's topological character, implying that disorder can lead to a topological phase transition even without breaking the time reversal symmetry. This observation challenges the conventional notion of topologically protected surface states and should prompt new studies as to the fundamental nature of topological phase of matter in the presence of disorder.

Material defects remain as the main bottleneck to the progress of topological insulators (TIs). In particular, efforts to achieve thin TI samples with dominant surface transport have always led to increased defects and degraded mobilities, thus making it difficult to probe the quantum regime of the topological surface states. Here, by utilizing a novel buffer layer scheme composed of an In2Se3/(Bi0.5In0.5)2Se3 heterostructure, we introduce a quantum generation of Bi2Se3 films with an order of magnitude enhanced mobilities than before. This scheme has led to the first observation of the quantum Hall effect in Bi2Se3., Comment: 33 pages, to be published in Nano Letters