π-flux Dirac bosons and topological edge excitations in a bosonic chiral p-wave superfluid

2016/02/29 by Zhi-Fang Xu, Li You, Andreas Hemmerich +1 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.quant-gas

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.117.085301

published as Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 085301 (2016) · 6+5 pages, 3+8 figures

arxiv created 2016/08/08 · arxiv updated 2016/08/16

Abstract

We study the topological properties of elementary excitations in a staggered p_x ± i p_y Bose-Einstein condensate realized in recent orbital optical lattice experiments. The condensate wave function may be viewed as a configuration space variant of the famous p_x+ ip_y momentum space order parameter of strontium ruthenate superconductors. We show that its elementary excitation spectrum possesses Dirac bosons with π Berry flux. Remarkably, if we induce a population imbalance between the p_x+ip_y and p_x-ip_y condensate components, a gap opens up in the excitation spectrum resulting in a nonzero Chern invariant and topologically protected edge excitation modes. We give a detailed description on how our proposal can be implemented with standard experimental technology.

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