Engineering Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Ultra-Cold Atoms

Abstract

Topological insulators are a broad class of unconventional materials that are insulating in the interior but conduct along the edges. This edge transport is topologically protected and dissipationless. Until recently, all existing topological insulators, known as quantum Hall states, violated time-reversal symmetry. However, the discovery of the quantum spin Hall effect demonstrated the existence of novel topological states not rooted in time-reversal violations. Here, we lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal topological insulators in ultra-cold atomic gases subjected to synthetic gauge fields in the near-field of an atom-chip. In particular, we introduce a feasible scheme to engineer sharp boundaries where the "edge states" are localized. Besides, this multi-band system has a large parameter space exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases. Due to their unprecedented controllability, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter and drive the development of topological quantum computing.

11 pages, 6 figures

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Cited by in corpus (6)

• High temperature fractional quantum Hall states
• Topological Phases for Fermionic Cold Atoms on the Lieb Lattice
• Chiral Rashba spin textures in ultra-cold Fermi gases
• Quantum anomalous Hall states in the $p$-orbital honeycomb optical lattices
• Topology-induced phase transitions in quantum spin Hall lattices
• Spin Susceptibility and Helical Magnetic Orders at the Edges/Surfaces of Topological Insulators Due to Fermi Surface Nesting