2013/08/31 by M. Burrello, Michele Burrello, I. C. Fulga +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Cold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates #Quantum many-body systems #Topological Materials and Phenomena #cond-mat.quant-gas #cond-mat.stat-mech #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.88.053619
published as Phys. Rev. A 88, 053619 (2013) · Published version with several extensions and improvements, 13 pages, 10 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
We analyze a tight-binding model of ultracold fermions loaded in an optical square lattice and subjected to a synthetic non-Abelian gauge potential featuring both a magnetic field and a translationally invariant SU(2) term. We consider in particular the effect of broken time-reversal symmetry and its role in driving nontrivial topological phase transitions. By varying the spin-orbit coupling parameters, we find both a semimetal-insulator phase transition and a topological phase transition between insulating phases with different numbers of edge states. The spin is not a conserved quantity of the system, and the topological phase transitions can be detected by analyzing its polarization in time-of-flight images, providing a clear diagnostic for the characterization of the topological phases through the partial entanglement between spin and lattice degrees of freedom.