Bloch oscillations (BOs) are a fundamental phenomenon by which a wave packet undergoes a periodic motion in a lattice when subjected to an external force. Observed in a wide range of synthetic lattice systems, BOs are intrinsically related to the geometric and topological properties of the underlying band structure. This has established BOs as a prominent tool for the detection of Berry phase effects, including those described by non-Abelian gauge fields. In this work, we unveil a unique topological effect that manifests in the BOs of higher-order topological insulators through the interplay of non-Abelian Berry curvature and quantized Wilson loops. It is characterized by an oscillating Hall drift that is synchronized with a topologically-protected inter-band beating and a multiplied Bloch period. We elucidate that the origin of this synchronization mechanism relies on the periodic quantum dynamics of Wannier centers. Our work paves the way to the experimental detection of non-Abelian topological properties in synthetic matter through the measurement of Berry phases and center-of-mass displacements.
We show that superlattices based on zero-gap semiconductors such as graphene and mercury telluride exhibit characteristic Bloch--Zener oscillations that emerge from the coherent superposition of Bloch oscillations and multiple Zener tunneling between the electron and hole branch. We demonstrate this mechanism by means of wave packet dynamics in various spatially periodically modulated nanoribbons subject to an external bias field. The associated Bloch frequencies exhibit a peculiar periodic bias dependence which we explain within a two-band model. Supported by extensive numerical transport cal…
The unique electronic properties of the surface electrons in a topological insulator are protected by time-reversal symmetry. Circularly polarized light naturally breaks time-reversal symmetry, which may lead to an exotic surface quantum Hall state. Using time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy, we show that an intense ultrashort mid-infrared pulse with energy below the bulk band gap hybridizes with the surface Dirac fermions of a topological insulator to form Floquet-Bloch bands. These photon dressed surface bands exhibit polarization-dependent band gaps at avoided crossings. Circ…
The coherent optical manipulation of solids is emerging as a promising way to engineer novel quantum states of matter. The strong time periodic potential of intense laser light can be used to generate hybrid photon-electron states. Interaction of light with Bloch states leads to Floquet-Bloch states which are essential in realizing new photo-induced quantum phases. Similarly, dressing of free electron states near the surface of a solid generates Volkov states which are used to study non-linear optics in atoms and semiconductors. The interaction of these two dynamic states with each other remai…
In this work, persistent currents in rings made of band insulators are analyzed theoretically. We first formulate a recipe which determines the Bloch states of a one-dimensional (1D) ring from the Bloch states of an infinite 1D crystal created by the periodic repetition of the ring. Using the recipe, we derive an expression for the persistent current in a 1D ring made of an insulator with an arbitrary valence band E(k). To find an exact result for a specific insulator, we consider a 1D ring represented by a periodic lattice of N identical sites with a single value of the on-site energy. If the…
Ferromagnets in contact with a topological insulator have become appealing candidates for spintronics due to the presence of Dirac surface states with spin-momentum locking. Because of this bilayer Bi$_2$Se$_3$-EuS structures, for instance, show a finite magnetization at the interface at temperatures well exceeding the Curie temperature of bulk EuS. Here we determine theoretically the effective magnetic interactions at a topological insulator-ferromagnet interface {\it above} the magnetic ordering temperature. We show that by integrating out the Dirac fermion fluctuations an effective Dzyalosh…
We study a non-Hermitian non-Abelian topological insulator preserving $PT$ symmetry, where the non-Hermitian term represents nonreciprocal hoppings. As it increases, a spontaneous $PT$ symmetry breaking transition occurs in the perfect-flat band model from a real-line-gap topological insulator into an imaginary-line-gap topological insulator. By introducing a band bending term, we realize two phase transitions, where a metallic phase emerges between the above two topological insulator phases. We discuss an electric-circuit realization of non-Hermitian non-Abelian topological insulators. We fin…
We study a model of an equal mixture of two species of fermions in a deep optical lattice at a filling of two fermions per site. At weak inter-species interaction, the system is a band insulator. When the inter-species interaction is tuned via a Feshbach resonance to be larger than an energy related to the energy separation of the first and second Bloch band, atoms populate equally the two Bloch bands. With weak tunneling between sites of the optical lattice, the system becomes a Mott insulator with the low energy effective Hamiltonian of a spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnet, because of a Hund'…
We numerically demonstrate that the topological corner states residing in the corners of higher-order topological insulator possess non-Abelian braiding properties. Such topological corner states are Dirac fermionic modes other than Majorana zero-modes. We claim that Dirac fermionic modes protected by nontrivial topology also support non-Abelian braiding. An analytical description on such non-Abelian braiding is conducted based on the vortex-induced Dirac-type fermionic modes. The braiding operator for Dirac fermionic modes is also analytically derivated and compared with the Majorana zero-mod…
Recent experiments showed that the surface of a three dimensional topological insulator develops gaps in the Floquet-Bloch band spectrum when illuminated with a circularly polarized laser. These Floquet-Bloch bands are characterized by non-trivial Chern numbers which only depend on the helicity of the polarization of the radiation field. Here we propose a setup consisting of a pair of counter-rotating lasers, and show that one-dimensional chiral states emerge at the interface between the two lasers. These interface states turn out to be spin-polarized and may trigger interesting applications i…
We propose a general framework of nonlinear optics induced by non-Abelian Berry curvature in time-reversal-invariant (TRI) insulators. We find that the third-order response of a TRI insulator under optical and terahertz light fields is directly related to the integration of the non-Abelian Berry curvature over the Brillouin zone. We apply the result to insulators with rotational symmetry near the band edge. Under resonant excitations, the optical susceptibility is proportional to the flux of the Berry curvature through the iso-energy surface, which is equal to the Chern number of the surface t…
Chern insulators are band insulators which exhibit a gap in the bulk and gapless excitations in the edge. Detection of Chern insulators is a serious challenge in cold atoms since the Hall transport measurements are technically unrealistic for neutral atoms. By establishing a natural correspondence between the time-reversal invariant topological insulator and quantum anomalous Hall system, we show for a class of Chern insulators that the topology can be determined by only measuring Bloch eigenstates at highly symmetric points of the Brillouin zone (BZ). Furthermore, we introduce two experimenta…
We study the open system dynamics and steady states of two dimensional Floquet topological insulators: systems in which a topological Floquet-Bloch spectrum is induced by an external periodic drive. We solve for the bulk and edge state carrier distributions, taking into account energy and momentum relaxation through radiative recombination and electron-phonon interactions, as well as coupling to an external lead. We show that the resulting steady state resembles a topological insulator in the Floquet basis. The particle distribution in the Floquet edge modes exhibits a sharp feature akin to th…
Under the action of a weak constant force a wavepacket in periodic potential undergoes periodic oscillations in space, returning to the initial position after one oscillation cycle. This wave phenomenon, known as Bloch oscillations (BOs), pertains to many physical systems. Can BOs also occur in topological insulators with topologically protected edge states? This question is highly nontrivial, because in topological insulators with broken time-reversal symmetry, the edge states propagate unidirectionally without backscattering, hence BOs that typically involve stages, where wavepacket moves al…
We propose the concept of 2D non-Abelian topological insulator which can explain the energy distributions of the edge states and corner states in systems with parity-time symmetry. From the viewpoint of non-Abelian band topology, we establish the constraints on the 2D Zak phase and polarization. We demonstrate that the corner states in some 2D systems can be explained as the boundary mode of the 1D edge states arising from the multi-band non-Abelian topology of the system. We also propose the use of off-diagonal Berry phase as complementary information to assist the prediction of edge states i…
Very recently, increasing attention has been focused on non-Abelian topological charges, e.g. the quaternion group Q8. Different from Abelian topological band insulators, these systems involve multiple tangled bulk bandgaps and support non-trivial edge states that manifest the non-Abelian topological features. Furthermore, a system with even or odd number of bands will exhibit significant difference in non-Abelian topological classifications. Up to now, there is scant research investigating the even-band non-Abelian topological insulators. Here, we both theoretically explored and experimentall…
The topological nature of nodal lines in a three-band system can be described by non-Abelian topological charges called quaternion numbers. Due to the gauge freedom of the eigenstates, the sign of the non-Abelian topological charges can be flipped by performing the gauge transformation, i.e., choosing a different basis of eigenstates. However, the sign flipping has not been explicitly shown in realistic systems such as phononic and photonic topological insulators. Here, we elaborate the sign freedom by visualizing the numerically calculated topological charges in phononic and photonic topologi…
We propose and implement a particularly effective method for calculating the Berry curvature arising from adiabatic evolution of Bloch states in wave vector k space. The method exploits a unique feature of the Korringa-Kohn-Rostoker (KKR) approach to solve the Schrödinger or Dirac equations. Namely, it is based on the observation that in the KKR method k enters the calculation via the structure constants which depend only on the geometry of the lattice but not the crystal potential. For both the Abelian and non-Abelian Berry curvature we derive an analytic formula whose evaluation does not req…
Interferometry of non-Abelian edge excitations is a useful tool in topological quantum computing. In this paper we present a theory of a non-Abelian edge state interferometer in a 3D topological insulator brought in proximity to an s-wave superconductor. The non-Abelian edge excitations in this system have the same statistics as in the previously studied 5/2 fractional quantum Hall (FQH) effect and chiral p-wave superconductors. There are however crucial differences between the setup we consider and these systems, like the need for a converter between charged and neutral excitations and the ne…
We consider a magnetic skyrmion crystal formed at the surface of a topological insulator. Incorporating the exchange interaction between the helical Dirac surface states and the periodic Néel or Bloch skyrmion texture, we obtain the resulting electronic band structure and discuss the constraints that symmetries impose on the energies and Berry curvature. We find substantive qualitative differences between the Néel and Bloch cases, with the latter generically permitting a multiband low energy tight-binding representation whose parameters are tightly constrained by symmetries. We explicitly comp…
We describe a method for engineering local $k+1$-body interactions ($k=1,2,3$) from two-body couplings in spin-${1}{2}$ systems. When implemented in certain systems with a flat single-particle band with a unit Chern number, the resulting many-body ground states are fractional Chern insulators which exhibit abelian and non-abelian anyon excitations. The most complex of these, with $k=3$, has Fibonacci anyon excitations; our system is thus capable of universal topological quantum computation. We then demonstrate that an appropriately tuned circuit of qubits could faithfully replicate this model …
Electronic bands in crystals are described by an ensemble of Bloch wave functions indexed by momenta defined in the first Brillouin Zone, and their associated energies. In an insulator, an energy gap around the chemical potential separates valence bands from conduction bands. The ensemble of valence bands is then a well defined object, which can possess non-trivial or twisted topological properties. In the case of a twisted topology, the insulator is called a topological insulator. We introduce this notion of topological order in insulators as an obstruction to define the Bloch wave functions …
While the Bloch spectrum of translationally invariant noninteracting lattice models is trivially obtained by a Fourier transformation, diagonalizing the same problem in the presence of open boundary conditions is typically only possible numerically or in idealized limits. Here we present exact analytic solutions for the boundary states in a number of lattice models of current interest, including nodal-line semimetals on a hyperhoneycomb lattice, spin-orbit coupled graphene, and three-dimensional topological insulators on a diamond lattice, for which no previous exact finite-size solutions are …
We report new oscillations of wavepackets in quantum walks subjected to electric fields, that decorate the usual Bloch-Zener oscillations of insulators. The number of turning points (or sub-oscillations) within one Bloch period of these oscillations is found to be governed by the winding of the quasienergy spectrum. Thus, this provides a new physical manifestation of a topological property of periodically driven systems that can be probed experimentally. Our model, based on an oriented scattering network, is readily implementable in photonic and cold atomic setups.
We consider a real periodic Schrödinger operator and a physically relevant family of $m \geq 1$ Bloch bands, separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum, and we investigate the localization properties of the corresponding composite Wannier functions. To this aim, we show that in dimension $d \leq 3$ there exists a global frame consisting of smooth quasi-Bloch functions which are both periodic and time-reversal symmetric. Aiming to applications in computational physics, we provide a constructive algorithm to obtain such a Bloch frame. The construction yields the existence of a basis of com…
We describe some applications of group- and bundle-theoretic methods in solid state physics, showing how symmetries lead to a proof of the localization of electrons in gapped crystalline solids, as e.g. insulators and semiconductors. We shortly review the Bloch-Floquet decomposition of periodic operators, and the related concepts of Bloch frames and composite Wannier functions. We show that the latter are almost-exponentially localized if and only if there exists a smooth periodic Bloch frame, and that the obstruction to the latter condition is the triviality of a Hermitian vector bundle, call…
In this Book Chapter (invited) we briefly review the basic concepts defining topological insulators and focus on elaborating on the key experimental results that revealed and established their symmetry protected (SPT) topological nature. We then present key experimental results that demonstrate magnetism, Kondo insulation, mirror chirality or topological crystalline order and superconductivity in spin-orbit topological insulator settings and how these new (bulk insulating) phases of matter arise through topological quantum phase transitions from Bloch band insulators via topological or Dirac s…
We argue that various kinds of topological insulators (TIs) can be insightfully characterized by an inspection of the charge centers of the hybrid Wannier functions, defined as the orbitals obtained by carrying out a Wannier transform on the Bloch functions in one dimension while leaving them Bloch-like in the other two. From this procedure, one can obtain the Wannier charge centers (WCCs) and plot them in the two-dimensional projected Brillouin zone. We show that these WCC sheets contain the same kind of topological information as is carried in the surface energy bands, with the crucial advan…
Topological materials are of great interest for applications in quantum computing, providing intrinsic robustness against environmental noises. A popular direction is to look for Majorana modes in integrated systems interfaced with superconducting materials. However, is superconductivity necessary for materials to exhibits non-abelian statistics? Here we predict with strong theoretical and numerical evidences that there exist topologically phases in a class of one-dimensional single crystals, which contain large bandgaps and are within experimental reach. Specifically, the nontrivial Zak phase…
The recent theoretical discovery of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) has provided an important new way to realize topologically ordered states in lattice models. In earlier works, on-site and nearest neighbor Hubbard-like interactions have been used extensively to stabilize Abelian FCIs in systems with nearly flat, topologically nontrivial bands. However, attempts to use two-body interactions to stabilize non-Abelian FCIs, where the ground state in the presence of impurities can be massively degenerate and manipulated through anyon braiding, have proven very difficult in uniform lattice syst…
$\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological insulators for photons and in general bosons cannot be strictly implemented because of the lack of symmetry-protected pseudospins. We show that the required protection can be provided by the real-space topological excitation of an interacting quantum fluid: quantum vortex. We consider a Bose-Einstein Condensate at the $Γ$ point of the Brillouin zone of a quantum valley Hall system based on two staggered honeycomb lattices. We demonstrate the existence of a coupling between the winding number of a vortex and the valley of the bulk Bloch band. This leads to chiral vort…
Bulk-boundary correspondence is the cornerstone of topological physics. In some non-Hermitian topological system this fundamental relation is broken in the sense that the topological number calculated for the Bloch energy band under the periodic boundary condition fails to reproduce the boundary properties under the open boundary. To restore the bulk-boundary correspondence in such non-Hermitian systems a framework beyond the Bloch band theory is needed. We develop a non-Hermitian Bloch band theory based on a modified periodic boundary condition that allows a proper description of the bulk of …
Bloch theory describes the electronic states in crystals whose energies are distributed as bands over the Brillouin zone. The electronic states corresponding to a (few) isolated energy band(s) thus constitute a vector bundle. The topological properties of these vector bundles provide new characteristics of the corresponding electronic phases. We review some of these properties in the case of (topological) insulators and semi-metals.
The Bloch wave functions have been playing a crucial role in the diagnosis of topological phases in non-interacting systems. However, the Bloch waves are no longer applicable in the presence of finite Coulomb interaction and alternative approaches are needed to identify the topological indices. In this paper, we focus on three-dimensional higher-order topological insulators protected by $C_4T$ symmetry and show that the topological index can be computed through eigenstates of inverse Green's function at zero frequency. If there is an additional $S_4$ rotoinversion symmetry, the topological ind…
Materials can be classified by the topological character of their electronic structure and, in this perspective, global attributes immune to local deformations have been discussed in terms of Berry curvature and Chern numbers. Except for instructional simple models, linear response theories have been ubiquitously employed in calculations of topological properties of real materials. Here we propose a completely different and versatile approach to get the topological characteristics of materials by calculating physical observables from the real-time evolving Bloch states: the cell-averaged curre…
Bloch's theorem is the centerpiece of topological band theory, which itself has defined an era of quantum materials research. However, Bloch's theorem is broken by a perpendicular magnetic field, making it difficult to study topological systems in strong flux. For the first time, moiré materials have made this problem experimentally relevant, and its solution is the focus of this work. We construct gauge-invariant irreps of the magnetic translation group at $2π$ flux on infinite boundary conditions, allowing us to give analytical expressions in terms of the Siegel theta function for the magnet…
Motivated by the recent work of QED$_3$-Chern-Simons quantum critical points of fractional Chern insulators (Phys. Rev. X \textbf{8}, 031015, (2018)), we study its non-Abelian generalizations, namely QCD$_3$-Chern-Simons quantum phase transitions of fractional Chern insulators. These phase transitions are described by Dirac fermions interacting with non-Abelian Chern-Simons gauge fields ($U(N)$, $SU(N)$, $USp(N)$, etc.). Utilizing the level-rank duality of Chern-Simons gauge theory and non-Abelian parton constructions, we discuss two types of QCD$_3$ quantum phase transitions. The first type h…
We study Mott insulators of fermionic alkaline earth atoms, described by Heisenberg spin models with enhanced SU(N) symmetry. In dramatic contrast to SU(2) magnetism, more than two spins are required to form a singlet. On the square lattice, the classical ground state is highly degenerate and magnetic order is thus unlikely. In a large-N limit, we find a chiral spin liquid ground state with topological order and Abelian fractional statistics. We discuss its experimental detection. Chiral spin liquids with non-Abelian anyons may also be realizable with alkaline earth atoms.
We theoretically study the occurrence of Bloch oscillations in biased hybrid graphene systems with spin-dependent superlattices. The spin-dependent potential is realized by a set of ferromagnetic insulator strips deposited on top of a gapped graphene nanoribbon, which induce a proximity exchange splitting of the electronic states in the graphene monolayer. We numerically solve the Dirac equation and study Bloch oscillations in the lowest conduction band of the spin-dependent superlattice. While the Bloch frequency is the same for both spins, we find the Bloch amplitude to be spin dependent. Th…
We investigate the localization properties of independent electrons in a periodic background, possibly including a periodic magnetic field, as e.g. in Chern insulators and in Quantum Hall systems. Since, generically, the spectrum of the Hamiltonian is absolutely continuous, localization is characterized by the decay, as $|x| \rightarrow \infty$, of the composite (magnetic) Wannier functions associated to the Bloch bands below the Fermi energy, which is supposed to be in a spectral gap. We prove the validity of a localization dichotomy, in the following sense: either there exist exponentially l…
We study the Landau-Zener tunneling problem for particles bound in periodic lattice insulators. To this end, we construct the path integral based on the Bloch and Wannier functions in the presence with an external force, and the transition amplitude is calculated for the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model. We find that the tunneling probability in bulk periodic systems becomes drastically larger than that by the Landau-Zener formula. This enhancement is prominent for small values of the external field or small hopping integral compared with the gap, and comes from the difference between the Dirac and …
Accessing Chern Numbers From Bloch Eigenstates Singularities
Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8523 – PhLAM（里尔大学）；Univ. Lille, CNRS, UMR 8524 - Laboratoire Paul Painlevé（里尔大学）；Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, Centre de Nanosciences et de Nanotechnologies（巴黎萨克雷大学）；CNRS, ENS de Lyon, LPENSL（里昂高等师范学院）
