Topological Electronics: From Infinity to Six

Abstract

Topology captures the essence of what remains unchanged under a transformation. In this study, a topological invariant called super conformality was found to preserve a critical angle between the constitutive plane and its second order differential plane for a two-terminal electric element as building blocks of modern electronics. This super conformality leads to local activity of a higher-order electric element so that the periodic table of the electric elements can be dramatically reduced to have only 6 passive ones, in contrast to the unbounded table predicted 40 years ago. Our claim that all the higher-order electric elements must be active was experimentally verified by the fact that a 2nd-order sodium memristor in the famous Hodgkin-Huxley circuit is locally active with an internal battery.