scholarly journals Real-space effects of a quench in the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and elusive dynamical appearance of the topological edge states

Author(s):  
Lorenzo Rossi ◽  
Fausto Rossi ◽  
Fabrizio Dolcini

Abstract The topological phase of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model is known to exhibit two edge states that are topologically protected by the chiral symmetry. We demonstrate that, for any parameter quench performed on the half-filled SSH chain, the occupancy of each lattice site remains locked to 1/2 at any time, due to the additional time-reversal and charge conjugation symmetries. In particular, for a quench from the trivial to the topological phase, no signature of the topological edge states appears in real-space occupancies, independently of the quench protocol, the temperature of the pre-quench thermal state or the presence of chiral disorder. However, a suitably designed local quench from/to a SSH ring threaded by a magnetic flux can break these additional symmetries while preserving the chiral one. Then, real-space effects of the quench do appear and exhibit different dynamical features in the topological and in the trivial phases. Moreover, when the particle filling is different from a half and the pre-quench state is not insulating, the dynamical appearance of the topological edge states is visible already in a chain, it survives time averaging and can be observed also in the presence of chiral-breaking disorder and for instantaneous quenches.

Nanophotonics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yong-Heng Lu ◽  
Yao Wang ◽  
Feng Mei ◽  
Yi-Jun Chang ◽  
Hang Zheng ◽  
...  

Abstract First- and second-order topological phases, capable of inherent protection against disorder of materials, have been recently experimentally demonstrated in various artificial materials through observing the topologically protected edge states. Topological phase transition represents a new class of quantum critical phenomena, which is accompanied by the changes related to the bulk topology of energy band structures instead of symmetry. However, it is still a challenge to directly observe the topological phase transitions defined in terms of bulk states. Here, we theoretically and experimentally demonstrate the direct observation of multifarious topological phase transitions with real-space indicator in a single photonic chip, which is formed by integration of 324 × 33 waveguides supporting both first- and second-order topological phases. The trivial-to-first-order, trivial-to-second-order and first-to-second-order topological phase transitions signified by the band gap closure can all be directly detected via photon evolution in the bulk. We further observe the creation and destruction of gapped topological edge states associated with these topological phase transitions. The bulk-state-based route to investigate the high-dimensional and high-order topological features, together with the platform of freely engineering topological materials by three-dimensional laser direct writing in a single photonic chip, opens up a new avenue to explore the mechanisms and applications of artificial devices.


Author(s):  
Yun-Tuan fang ◽  
Xiao-Xue Li ◽  
Li-Xia Yang

The Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model can occur in a one-dimensional (1D) diatomic chain photonic crystal (PC) in which a unit cell includes two same slabs (atoms). With different intervals of the two slabs, the two combined 1D PCs can support topological edge states in all photonic boundary bandgaps. These topological edge states come from the inversion of topological phase of the bands through the band folding effect. When the sum of the two atom intervals in the two different 1D PCs equals to the unit cell length, these edge state frequencies keep invariant.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Milad Jangjan ◽  
Mir Vahid Hosseini

AbstractWe theoretically report the finding of a new kind of topological phase transition between a normal insulator and a topological metal state where the closing-reopening of bandgap is accompanied by passing the Fermi level through an additional band. The resulting nontrivial topological metal phase is characterized by stable zero-energy localized edge states that exist within the full gapless bulk states. Such states living on a quasi-one-dimensional system with three sublattices per unit cell are protected by hidden inversion symmetry. While other required symmetries such as chiral, particle-hole, or full inversion symmetry are absent in the system.


2020 ◽  
Vol 500 (1) ◽  
pp. 911-925
Author(s):  
Carlos M Correa ◽  
Dante J Paz ◽  
Ariel G Sánchez ◽  
Andrés N Ruiz ◽  
Nelson D Padilla ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Voids are promising cosmological probes. Nevertheless, every cosmological test based on voids must necessarily employ methods to identify them in redshift space. Therefore, redshift-space distortions (RSD) and the Alcock–Paczyński effect (AP) have an impact on the void identification process itself generating distortion patterns in observations. Using a spherical void finder, we developed a statistical and theoretical framework to describe physically the connection between the identification in real and redshift space. We found that redshift-space voids above the shot noise level have a unique real-space counterpart spanning the same region of space, they are systematically bigger and their centres are preferentially shifted along the line of sight. The expansion effect is a by-product of RSD induced by tracer dynamics at scales around the void radius, whereas the off-centring effect constitutes a different class of RSD induced at larger scales by the global dynamics of the whole region containing the void. The volume of voids is also altered by the fiducial cosmology assumed to measure distances, this is the AP change of volume. These three systematics have an impact on cosmological statistics. In this work, we focus on the void size function. We developed a theoretical framework to model these effects and tested it with a numerical simulation, recovering the statistical properties of the abundance of voids in real space. This description depends strongly on cosmology. Hence, we lay the foundations for improvements in current models of the abundance of voids in order to obtain unbiased cosmological constraints from redshift surveys.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lizhen Lu ◽  
Kun Ding ◽  
Emanuele Galiffi ◽  
Xikui Ma ◽  
Tianyu Dong ◽  
...  

AbstractSymmetry deepens our insight into a physical system and its interplay with topology enables the discovery of topological phases. Symmetry analysis is conventionally performed either in the physical space of interest, or in the corresponding reciprocal space. Here we borrow the concept of virtual space from transformation optics to demonstrate how a certain class of symmetries can be visualised in a transformed, spectrally related coordinate space, illuminating the underlying topological transitions. By projecting a plasmonic system in a higher-dimensional virtual space onto a lower-dimensional system in real space, we show how transformation optics allows us to construct a topologically non-trivial system by inspecting its modes in the virtual space. Interestingly, we find that the topological invariant can be controlled via the singularities in the conformal mapping, enabling the intuitive engineering of edge states. The confluence of transformation optics and topology here can be generalized to other wave realms beyond photonics.


2019 ◽  
Vol 99 (21) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Röntgen ◽  
C. V. Morfonios ◽  
R. Wang ◽  
L. Dal Negro ◽  
P. Schmelcher

Science ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 367 (6479) ◽  
pp. 794-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhi-Da Song ◽  
Luis Elcoro ◽  
B. Andrei Bernevig

A topological insulator reveals its nontrivial bulk through the presence of gapless edge states: This is called the bulk-boundary correspondence. However, the recent discovery of “fragile” topological states with no gapless edges casts doubt on this concept. We propose a generalization of the bulk-boundary correspondence: a transformation under which the gap between the fragile phase and other bands must close. We derive specific twisted boundary conditions (TBCs) that can detect all the two-dimensional eigenvalue fragile phases. We develop the concept of real-space invariants, local good quantum numbers in real space, which fully characterize these phases and determine the number of gap closings under the TBCs. Realizations of the TBCs in metamaterials are proposed, thereby providing a route to their experimental verification.


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