The Haldane model on the honeycomb lattice is a paradigmatic example of a Hamiltonian featuring topologically distinct phases of matter. It describes a mechanism through which a quantum Hall effect can appear as an intrinsic property of a band-structure, rather than being caused by an external magnetic field. Although an implementation in a material was considered unlikely, it has provided the conceptual basis for theoretical and experimental research exploring topological insulators and superconductors. Here we report on the experimental realisation of the Haldane model and the characterisation of its topological band-structure, using ultracold fermionic atoms in a periodically modulated optical honeycomb lattice. The model is based on breaking time-reversal symmetry as well as inversion symmetry. The former is achieved through the introduction of complex next-nearest-neighbour tunnelling terms, which we induce through circular modulation of the lattice position. For the latter, we create an energy offset between neighbouring sites. Breaking either of these symmetries opens a gap in the band-structure, which is probed using momentum-resolved interband transitions. We explore the resulting Berry-curvatures of the lowest band by applying a constant force to the atoms and find orthogonal drifts analogous to a Hall current. The competition between both broken symmetries gives rise to a transition between topologically distinct regimes. By identifying the vanishing gap at a single Dirac point, we map out this transition line experimentally and quantitatively compare it to calculations using Floquet theory without free parameters. We verify that our approach, which allows for dynamically tuning topological properties, is suitable even for interacting fermionic systems. Furthermore, we propose a direct extension to realise spin-dependent topological Hamiltonians.
Ultracold atom experiments allow the study of topological insulators, such as the noninteracting Haldane model. In this work we study a generalization of the Haldane model with spin-spin on-site interactions that can be implemented on such experiments. We focus on measuring the winding number, a topological invariant, of the ground state, which we compute using a mean-field calculation that effectively captures long range correlations and a matrix product state computation in a lattice with 64 sites. Our main result is that we show how the topological phases present in the noninteracting model…
Topological phases are characterized by their entanglement properties, which is manifest in a direct relation between entanglement spectra and edge states discovered by Li and Haldane. We propose to leverage the power of synthetic quantum systems for measuring entanglement via the Entanglement Hamiltonian to probe this relationship experimentally. This is made possible by exploiting the quasi-local structure of Entanglement Hamiltonians. The feasibility of this proposal is illustrated for two paradigmatic examples realizable with current technology, an integer quantum Hall state of non-interac…
We propose a Haldane-BCS-Hubbard model on a honeycomb lattice, which is composed of two copies of the Haldane model of the quantum anomalous Hall effect, an equal-spin pairing term and an onsite Hubbard interaction term. For any interaction strength, this model is exactly solvable along the symmetric line where the hopping and pairing amplitudes are equal to each other. The ground state of the Haldane-BCS-Hubbard model is a topological superconducting state at weak interaction with two chiral Majorana edge states. A strong interaction drives the system across a topological quantum phase transi…
We study the Haldane model with nearest-neighbor interactions. This model is physically motivated by the associated ultracold atoms implementation. We show that the topological phase of the interacting model can be characterized by a physically observable winding number. The robustness of this number extends well beyond the topological insulator phase towards attractive and repulsive interactions that are comparable to the kinetic energy scale of the model. We identify and characterize the relevant phases of the model.
Motivated by exploring the effect of interactions on Chern insulators, and by recent experiments realizing topological bands for ultracold atoms in synthetic gauge fields, we study the honeycomb lattice Haldane-Hubbard model of spin-$1/2$ fermions. Using an unrestricted mean field approach, we map out the instability of the topological band insulator towards magnetically ordered insulators which emerge with increasing Hubbard repulsion. In addition to the topological Néel phase, we recover various chiral noncoplanar magnetic orders previously identified within a strong coupling approach. We co…
The interplay between antiferromagnetic interaction and hole motion is capable of inducing intriguing conducting topological Haldane phases described by a finite non-local string order parameter. Here we show that these states of matter are captured by the one dimensional $t-J_z$ model which can be experimentally realized with dressed Rydberg atoms trapped onto a one dimensional optical lattice. In the sector with vanishing total magnetization exact Bethe ansatz calculations associated to bosonization technique allow to predict that both metallic and superconducting topological Haldane states …
In this letter we study the Haldane model with on-site repulsive interactions at half-filling. We show that the mean-field Hamiltonian with magnetic order effectively modifies parameters in the Haldane Hamiltonian, such as sublattice energy difference and phase in next nearest hopping. As interaction increases, increasing of magnetic order corresponds to varying these parameters and consequently, drives topological transitions. At the mean-field level, one scenario is that the magnetic order continuously increases, and inevitably, the fermion gap closes at the topological transition point with…
We study the topological properties of the two-body bound states in an interacting Haldane model as a function of interparticle interactions. In particular, we identify topological phases where the two-body edge states have either the same or the opposite chirality as compared to single-particle edge states. We highlight that in the moderately interacting regime, which is relevant for the experimental realization with ultracold atoms, the topological transition is affected by the internal structure of the bound state, and the phase boundaries are consequently deformed.
We have simulated a half-filled $1D$ $p$-wave periodic Anderson model with numerically exact projector quantum Monte Carlo technique, and the system is indeed located in the Haldane-like state as detected in previous works on the $p$-wave Kondo lattice model, though the soluble non-interacting limit corresponds to the conventional $Z_{2}$ topological insulator. The site-resolved magnetization in an open boundary system and strange correlator for the periodic boundary have been used to identify the mentioned topological states. Interestingly, the edge magnetization in the Haldane-like state is …
We show that ultracold two-component fermionic dipolar gases in an optical lattice with strong two-body on-site loss can be used to realize a tunable effective spin-one model. Fermion number conservation provides an unusual constraint that $\sum_i (S^z_i)^2$ is conserved, leading to a novel topological liquid phase in one dimension which can be thought of as the gapless analog of the Haldane gapped phase of a spin-one Heisenberg chain. The properties of this phase are calculated numerically via the infinite time-evolving block decimation method and analytically via a mapping to a one-mode Lutt…
We have studied the one-dimensional $p$-wave periodic Anderson model at finite temperature with the help of the numerically exact determinant quantum Monte Carlo simulation. It is found that the topological Haldane phase established for ground-state is still stable against small thermal fluctuation and its characteristic edge magnetization develops at low temperature. Moreover, the saturated low-$T$ spin structure factor and the $\frac{1}{T}$-law of susceptibility are useful to detect the free edge spin moment, which may be relevant for experimental explorations. We have also comparatively stu…
We investigate the groundstate properties of a recently proposed model for a topological Kondo insulator in one dimension (i.e., the $p$-wave Kondo-Heisenberg lattice model) by means of the Density Matrix Renormalization Group method. The non-standard Kondo interaction in this model is different from the usual (i.e., local) Kondo interaction in that the localized spins couple to the "$p$-wave" spin density of conduction electrons, inducing a topologically non-trivial insulating groundstate. Based on the analysis of the charge- and spin-excitation gaps, the string order parameter, and the spin …
Motivated by experiments on ultracold atoms which have realized the Haldane model for a Chern insulator, we consider its strongly correlated Mott limit with spin-$1/2$ fermions. We find that slave rotor mean field theory yields gapped or gapless chiral spin liquid Mott insulators. To study competing magnetic orders, we consider the strong coupling effective spin Hamiltonian which includes chiral three-spin exchange. We obtain its classical phase diagram, uncovering various chiral magnetic orders including tetrahedral, cone, and noncoplanar spiral states which can compete with putative chiral q…
We study, by means of the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) technique, the evolution of the ground state in a one-dimensional topological insulator, from the non-interacting to the strongly-interacting limit, where the system can be mapped onto a topological Kondo-insulator model. We focus on a toy model Hamiltonian (i.e., the interacting "$sp$-ladder" model), which could be experimentally realized in optical lattices with higher orbitals loaded with ultra-cold fermionic atoms. Our goal is to shed light on the emergence of the strongly-interacting ground state and its topological cla…
Motivated by the recent realization of the Haldane model in shaking optical lattice, we investigate the effects of attractive interaction and BEC-BCS crossover in this model at and away from half filling. We show that, contrary to the usual s-wave BEC-BCS crossover in the lattice, a topological superfluid with Chern number C=2 appears in an extended region of phase space for intermediate strength of the attractive interaction in the interaction-density plane. When inversion symmetry is broken, a new gapless topological state is realized. We also investigate the fluctuations in these superfluid…
Using dynamical mean-field theory and exact diagonalization we study the phase diagram of the repulsive Haldane-Hubbard model, varying the interaction strength and the sublattice potential difference. In addition to the quantum Hall phase with Chern number $C=2$ and the band insulator with $C=0$ present already in the noninteracting model, the system also exhibits a $C=0$ Mott insulating phase, and a $C=1$ quantum Hall phase. We explain the latter phase by a spontaneous symmetry breaking where one of the spin-components is in the Hall state and the other in the band insulating state.
We propose to realize an exotic Haldane superfluid (HSF) phase in an extended Bose-Hubbard model on the two-leg ladder (i.e., a two-species mixture of interacting bosons). The proposal is confirmed by means of large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations, with a significant part of the ground-state phase diagram being revealed. Most remarkably, the newly discovered HSF phase features both superfluidity and the non-local topological Haldane order. The effects induced by varying the number of legs are furthermore explored. Our results shed light on how topological superfluid emerges in bosonic sy…
We present an ab initio analysis of a continuous Hamiltonian that maps into the celebrated Haldane model. The tunnelling coefficients of the tight-binding model are computed by means of two independent methods - one based on the maximally localized Wannier functions, the other through analytic expressions in terms of gauge-invariant properties of the spectrum - that provide a remarkable agreement and allow to accurately reproduce the exact spectrum of the continuous Hamiltonian. By combining these results with the numerical calculation of the Chern number, we are able to draw the phase diagram…
Using density matrix renormalization group numerical calculations, we study the phase diagram of the half filled Bose-Hubbard system in the sawtooth lattice with strong frustration in the kinetic energy term. We focus in particular on values of the hopping terms which produce a flat band and show that, in the presence of contact and near neighbor repulsion, three phases exist: Mott insulator (MI), charge density wave (CDW), and the topological Haldane insulating (HI) phase which displays edge states and particle imbalance between the two ends of the system. We find that, even though the entang…
We consider ultracold atoms in a two-dimensional optical lattice of the dice geometry in a tight-binding regime. The atoms experience a laser-assisted tunneling between the nearest neighbour sites of the dice lattice accompanied by the momentum recoil. This allows one to engineer staggered synthetic magnetic fluxes over plaquettes, and thus pave a way towards a realization of topologically nontrivial band structures. In such a lattice the real-valued next-neighbour transitions are not needed to reach a topological regime. Yet, such transitions can increase a variety of the obtained topological…
Using the recently developed Bloch-state tomography technique, the quasimomentum $\bf k$-dependent Bloch states ${\left( {\sin \left( {θ_{\mathbf{k}}/2} \right),\; - \cos \left( {θ_{\mathbf{k}}/2} \right){e^{i{ϕ_{\mathbf{k}}}}}} \right)^T}$ of a two-band tight-binding model with two sublattices can be mapped out. We show that, if we prepare the initial Bloch state as the lower-band eigenstate of a topologically trivial Haldane Hamiltonian $H_i$, and then quench the Haldane Hamiltonian to $H_f$, the time-dependent azimuthal phase ${ϕ_{\mathbf{k}}(t)}$ supports two types of vortices. The first t…
We investigate the correspondence between the tight-binding Floquet Hamiltonian of a periodically modulated honeycomb lattice and the Haldane model. We show that - though the two systems share the same topological phase diagram, as reported in a breakthrough experiment with ultracold atoms in a stretched honeycomb lattice [Jotzu et al., Nature 515, 237 (2014)] - the corresponding Hamiltonians are not equivalent, the one of the shaken lattice presenting a much richer structure.
We analyze an experimentally realizable model of bosons in a zig-zag optical lattice, showing that by rapidly modulating the magnetic field one can tune interaction parameters and realize an analog of the Haldane phase. We explain how quantum gas microscopy can be used to detect this phase's non-local string order and its topological edge states. We model the detection process. We also find that this model can display supersolid correlations, but argue that they only occur at parameter values which would be challenging to realize in an experiment.
Based on a quasi-one-dimensional limit of quantum Hall states on a thin torus, we construct a model of interaction-induced topological pumping which mimics the Hall response of the bosonic integer quantum Hall (BIQH) state. The quasi-one-dimensional counterpart of the BIQH state is identified as the Haldane phase composed of two-component bosons which form effective spin-$1$ degrees of freedom. An adiabatic change between the Haldane phase and trivial Mott insulators constitute {\it off-diagonal} topological pumping in which the translation of the lattice potential for one component induces a …
