We present a study of non-equilibrium phenomena observed in the electrical conductance of insulating granular aluminium thin films. An anomalous field effect and its slow relaxation are studied in some detail. The phenomenology is very similar to the one already observed in indium oxide. The origin of the phenomena is discussed. In granular systems, the present experiments can naturally be interpreted along two different lines. One relies on a slow polarisation in the dielectric surrounding the metallic islands. The other one relies on a purely electronic mechanism: the formation of an electron Coulomb glass in the granular metal. More selective experiments and/or quantitative predictions about the Coulomb glass properties are still needed to definitely distinguish between the two scenarii.

We have synthesized for the first time the metastable compound 1T-CrTe2. We have done its complete structural characterization and measured its magnetization, specific heat and electrical resistivity between 4 and 330 K. We have also performed detailed band structure calculations. We have found that it crystallizes in the CdI2 structure type and that its electrical resistance follows a metallic behaviour below room temperature. Its magnetization and specific heat curves show that the compound has a transition to a ferromagnetic state at TC = 310 K, with the magnetic moments ordered parallel to the basal plane. From the specific heat measurements and the ferromagnetic solutions obtained from our DFT calculations, we conclude that the ferromagnetism is of itinerant nature.

The ground state of charge neutral graphene under perpendicular magnetic field was predicted to be a quantum Hall topological insulator with a ferromagnetic order and spin-filtered, helical edge channels. In most experiments, however, an otherwise insulating state is observed and is accounted for by lattice-scale interactions that promote a broken-symmetry state with gapped bulk and edge excitations. We tuned the ground state of the graphene zeroth Landau level to the topological phase via a suitable screening of the Coulomb interaction with a SrTiO3 high-k dielectric substrate. We observed robust helical edge transport emerging at a magnetic field as low as 1 tesla and withstanding temperatures up to 110 kelvins over micron-long distances. This new and versatile graphene platform opens new avenues for spintronics and topological quantum computation.There is a variety of topological phases that are classified by their dimensionality, symmetries and topological invariants [1,2]. They all share the remarkable property that the topological bulk gap closes at every interfaces with vacuum or a trivial insulator, forming conductive edge states with peculiar transport and spin properties. The quantum Hall effect that arises in two-dimensional (2D) electron systems subjected to a perpendicular magnetic field, B, stands out as a paradigmatic example characterized by the Chern number that quantizes the Hall conductivity and counts the number of chiral, onedimensional edge channels. The singular aspect of quantum Hall systems compared to time-reversal symmetric topological insulators (TIs) lies in the pivotal role of Coulomb interaction between electrons that can induce a wealth of strongly correlated, symmetry or topologicallyprotected phases, ubiquitously observed in various experimental systems [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12].In graphene the immediate consequence of the Coulomb interaction is an instability towards quantum Hall ferromagnetism. Due to exchange interaction, a spontaneous breaking of the SU(4) symmetry splinters the Landau levels into quartets of broken-symmetry states that are polarized in one, or a combination of the spin and valley (pseudospin) degrees of freedom [15][16][17].Central to this phenomenon is the fate of the zeroth Landau level and its quantum Hall ground states. It was early predicted that if the Zeeman spin-splitting (enhanced by exchange interaction) overcomes the valley splitting, a topological inversion between the lowest electron-type and highest hole-type sub-levels should occur [13,18]. At charge neutrality, the ensuing ground state is a quantum Hall ferromagnet with two filled states of identical spin polarization, and an edge dispersion that exhibits two counter-propagating, spin-filtered helical edge channels ( Fig. 1A and B), similar to those of the quantum spin Hall (QSH) effect in 2D TIs [19][20][21][22][23]. Such a spin-polarized ferromagnetic (F) phase belongs to the recently identified new class of interaction-induced TIs with zero Chern number, termed quantum Hall topolog...