Design of laser-coupled honeycomb optical lattices supporting Chern insulators

Abstract

We introduce an explicit scheme to realize Chern insulating phases employing cold atoms trapped in a state-dependent optical lattice and laser-induced tunneling processes. The scheme uses two internal states, a ground state and a long-lived excited state, respectively trapped in separate triangular and honeycomb optical lattices. A resonant laser coherently coupling the two internal states enables hopping between the two sublattices with a Peierls-like phase factor. Although laser-induced hopping by itself does not lead to topological bands with non-zero Chern numbers, we find that such bands emerge when adding an auxiliary lattice that perturbs the lattice structure, effectively turning it at low energies into a realization of the Haldane model: A two-dimensional honeycomb lattice breaking time-reversal symmetry. We investigate the parameters of the resulting tight-binding model using first-principles band structure calculations to estimate the relevant regimes for experimental implementation.

9 pages, 7 figures, final version

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The role of real-space micromotion for bosonic and fermionic Floquet fractional Chern insulators
• The Realization and Dectection of Weyl Semimetals and Chiral Anomaly in Cold Atomic Systems
• Chiral Bosonic Phases on the Haldane Honeycomb Lattice
• Three-level Haldane-like model on dice optical lattice
• Loading Ultracold Gases in Topological Floquet Bands: Current and Center-of-Mass Responses
• Breakdown of the Peierls substitution for the Haldane model with ultracold atoms
• Fractional Quantum Hall States of Dipolar Gases in Chern Bands
• Generalized Interaction-Free Evolutions
• Implementing Majorana fermions in a cold-atom honeycomb lattice with textured pairings
• Synthetic spin-orbit coupling for the multispin models in optical lattices