Engineering Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Ultra-Cold Atoms

Published

December 16, 2010

Author(s)

Ian B. Spielman, Nathan Goldman, Indubala I. Satija, Predrag Nikolic, Alejandro Bermudez, Miguel A. Martin-Delgado, Maciej Lewenstein

Abstract

Topological insulators are a broad class of unconventional states that respect all symmetries of the system, but have non-trivial transport and topological properties which cannot be defined locally. Until recently, all known realizations of these phases violated time-reversal symmetry, such as the quantum Hall states. However, the discovery of the quantum spin Hall effect in HgTe quantum wells and Bi_{2 Te}d3, demonstrated the existence of novel topological states not rooted in time-reversal violations. Here, we design an experimental realization of time-reversal invariant topological insulators using ultra-cold gases subjected to synthetic SU(2) gauge fields in the near-field of an atom-chip. This system offers a rich playground where a variety of novel quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases arise in a multi-band scenario. Due to their unprecedented controllability, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter, so relevant for strongly correlated materials and quantum computation.

Citation

Nature Physics

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

DOI Link

Keywords

artificial gauge fields, topological insulators, ultracold atoms

Citation

Spielman, I. , , N. , Satija, I. , Nikolic, P. , Bermudez, A. , Martin-Delgado, M. and Lewenstein, M. (2010), Engineering Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Ultra-Cold Atoms, Nature Physics, [online], https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.105.255302 (Accessed March 3, 2025)