Designing Topological Bands in Reciprocal Space

Abstract

Motivated by new capabilities to realise artificial gauge fields in ultracold atomic systems, and by their potential to access correlated topological phases in lattice systems, we present a new strategy for designing topologically non-trivial band structures. Our approach is simple and direct: it amounts to considering tight-binding models directly in reciprocal space. These models naturally cause atoms to experience highly uniform magnetic flux density and lead to topological bands with very narrow dispersion, without fine-tuning of parameters. Further, our construction immediately yields instances of optical Chern lattices, as well as band structures of higher Chern number, |C|>1.

References in corpus (6)

• Ultracold atomic gases in optical lattices: mimicking condensed matter physics and beyond
• High temperature fractional quantum Hall states
• Fractional quantum Hall states at zero magnetic field
• Nearly-flat bands with nontrivial topology
• Tunable gauge potential for neutral and spinless particles in driven lattices
• Optical Flux Lattices for Ultracold Atomic Gases