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 (51)

• Topological Photonics
• High temperature fractional quantum Hall states
• Topological Quantum Matter with Ultracold Gases in Optical Lattices
• Degenerate Quantum Gases with Spin-Orbit Coupling
• Non-standard Hubbard models in optical lattices: a review
• Non-Abelian gauge fields and topological insulators in shaken optical lattices
• Topological Phases for Fermionic Cold Atoms on the Lieb Lattice
• Correlation effects in two-dimensional topological insulators
• Direct imaging of topological edge states in cold-atom systems
• Topological orbital ladders
• Manipulating Topological Edge Spins in One-Dimensional Optical Lattice
• Detecting Chiral Edge States in the Hofstadter Optical Lattice
• Chiral Rashba spin textures in ultra-cold Fermi gases
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• Topological Bogoliubov excitations in inversion-symmetric systems of interacting bosons
• Quantum simulation of non-trivial topology
• Quantum anomalous Hall states in the $p$-orbital honeycomb optical lattices
• Phonon-induced topological insulation
• Topology-induced phase transitions in quantum spin Hall lattices
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• Dimensional crossover and cold-atom realization of topological Mott insulators
• Change of an insulator's topological properties by a Hubbard interaction
• Identifying topological edge states in 2D optical lattices using light scattering
• Controlling Transport of Ultra-Cold Atoms in 1D Optical Lattices with Artificial Gauge Fields
• Topological transport in a spin-orbit coupled bosonic Mott insulator
• Quantum Phases of Two-Component Bosons with Spin-Orbit Coupling in Optical Lattices
• Kane-Mele-Hubbard model on the $\pi$-flux honeycomb lattice
• Antiferromagnetic Chern insulator in centrosymmetric systems
• Vortices and vortex states in Rashba spin-orbit-coupled condensates
• Floquet topological phases with large winding number
• Detecting topological transitions in two dimensions by Hamiltonian evolution
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• Eigenspectrum, Chern Numbers and Phase Diagrams of Ultracold Color-orbit Coupled SU(3) Fermions in Optical Lattices
• Spin Excitation Spectra of Spin-Orbit Coupled Bosons in Optical Lattice
• Collective modes for helical edge state interacting with quantum light
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• Experimental Proposal on Non-Abelian Aharonov-Bohm Caging Effect with a Single Trapped Ion