Hopf insulators and their topologically protected surface states

2013/07/31 by Dong-Ling Deng, Sheng-Tao Wang, Chao Shen +2
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum many-body systems #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.mes-hall

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevb.88.201105

published as Phys. Rev. B 88, 201105(R) (2013) · 7 pages (including supplemental material), 4 figures

openalex publication_date 2013/11/15 · arxiv created 2013/11/18 · arxiv updated 2013/11/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators in general need to be protected by certain kinds of symmetries other than the presumed U(1) charge conservation. A peculiar exception is the Hopf insulators which are 3D topological insulators characterized by an integer Hopf index. To demonstrate the existence and physical relevance of the Hopf insulators, we construct a class of tight-binding model Hamiltonians which realize all kinds of Hopf insulators with arbitrary integer Hopf index. These Hopf insulator phases have topologically protected surface states and we numerically demonstrate the robustness of these topologically protected states under general random perturbations without any symmetry other than the U(1) charge conservation that is implicit in all kinds of topological insulators.

Citations

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