2011/04/30 by Nathan Goldman, N. Goldman, Wouter Beugeling +2 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Condensed matter physics #Doublet state #Electron #Magnetic field #Phase transition #Physics #Quantum #Quantum Hall effect #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #Quantum phase transition #Quantum spin Hall effect #Quantum spin liquid #Skyrmion #Spin (aerodynamics) #Spin Hall effect #Spin engineering #Spin polarization #Spin–orbit interaction #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological order #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.quant-gas #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1209/0295-5075/97/23003
published as EPL 97 (2012) 23003 · 8 pages, 3 figures, Accepted in Europhys. Lett. (Dec 2011)
arxiv created 2011/12/13 · openalex publication_date 2012/01/01 · arxiv updated 2012/01/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
We consider the combined effects of large spin-orbit couplings and a perpendicular magnetic field in a 2D honeycomb fermionic lattice. This system provides an elegant setup to generate versatile spin textures propagating along the edge of a sample. The spin-orbit coupling is shown to induce topological phase transitions between a helical quantum spin Hall phase and a chiral spin-imbalanced quantum Hall state. Besides, we find that the spin orientation of a single topological edge state can be tuned by a Rashba spin-orbit coupling, opening an interesting route towards quantum spin manipulation. We discuss the possible realization of our results using cold atoms trapped in optical lattices, where large synthetic magnetic fields and spin-orbit couplings can be engineered and finely tuned. In particular, this system would lead to the observation of a time-reversal symmetry-broken quantum spin Hall phase.