2020/08/12 by Qinghua Guo, Tianshu Jiang, Ruo-Yang Zhang +5 · 3 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.mes-hall #physics.optics
paper · pdf · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03521-3
20 pages, 4 figures
arxiv created 2020/08/12 · arxiv updated 2021/07/14
In the past decades, topological concepts have emerged to classify matter states beyond the Ginzburg-Landau symmetry breaking paradigm. The underlying global invariants are usually characterized by integers, such as Chern or winding numbers. Very recently, band topology characterized by non-Abelian topological charges has been proposed, which possess non-commutative and fruitful braiding structures with multiple (>1) bandgaps entangled together. Despite many potential exquisite applications including quantum computations, no experimental observation of non-Abelian topological charges has been reported. Here, we experimentally observe the non-Abelian topological charges in a PT (parity and time-reversal) symmetric system. More importantly, we propose non-Abelian bulk-edge correspondence, where edge states are found to be described by non-Abelian charges. Our work opens the door towards non-Abelian topological phase characterization and manipulation.