Four-band non-Abelian topological insulator and its experimental realization

Tianshu Jiang, Qinghua Guo, Ruo-Yang Zhang, Zhao-Qing Zhang, Biao Yang () and C. T. Chan ()
Additional contact information
Tianshu Jiang: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Qinghua Guo: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Ruo-Yang Zhang: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Zhao-Qing Zhang: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Biao Yang: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
C. T. Chan: The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Nature Communications, 2021, vol. 12, issue 1, 1-9

Abstract: Abstract Very recently, increasing attention has been focused on non-Abelian topological charges, e.g., the quaternion group Q8. Different from Abelian topological band insulators, these systems involve multiple entangled bulk bandgaps and support nontrivial edge states that manifest the non-Abelian topological features. Furthermore, a system with an even or odd number of bands will exhibit a significant difference in non-Abelian topological classification. To date, there has been scant research investigating even-band non-Abelian topological insulators. Here, we both theoretically explore and experimentally realize a four-band PT (inversion and time-reversal) symmetric system, where two new classes of topological charges as well as edge states are comprehensively studied. We illustrate their difference in the four-dimensional (4D) rotation sense on the stereographically projected Clifford tori. We show the evolution of the bulk topology by extending the 1D Hamiltonian onto a 2D plane and provide the accompanying edge state distributions following an analytical method. Our work presents an exhaustive study of four-band non-Abelian topological insulators and paves the way towards other even-band systems.

Date: 2021
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-26763-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:12:y:2021:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-021-26763-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-021-26763-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().