No Arabic abstract
Robust edge transport can occur when particles in crystalline lattices interact with an external magnetic field. This system is well described by Blochs theorem, with the spectrum being composed of bands of bulk states and in-gap edge states. When the confining lattice geometry is altered to be quasicrystaline, then Blochs theorem breaks down. However, we still expect to observe the basic characteristics of bulk states and current carrying edge states. Here, we show that for quasicrystals in magnetic fields, there is also a third option; the bulk localised transport states. These states share the in-gap nature of the well-known edge states and can support transport along them, but they are fully contained within the bulk of the system, with no support along the edge. We consider both finite and infinite systems, using rigorous error controlled computational techniques that are not prone to finite-size effects. The bulk localised transport states are preserved for infinite systems, in stark contrast to the normal edge states. This allows for transport to be observed in infinite systems, without any perturbations, defects, or boundaries being introduced. We confirm the in-gap topological nature of the bulk localised transport states for finite and infinite systems by computing common topological measures; namely the Bott index and local Chern marker. The bulk localised transport states form due to a magnetic aperiodicity arising from the interplay of length scales between the magnetic field and quasiperiodic lattice. Bulk localised transport could have interesting applications similar to those of the edge states on the boundary, but that could now take advantage of the larger bulk of the lattice. The infinite size techniques introduced here, especially the calculation of topological measures, could also be widely applied to other crystalline, quasicrystalline, and disordered models.
We show that finite lattices with arbitrary boundaries may support large degenerate subspaces, stemming from the underlying translational symmetry of the lattice. When the lattice is coupled to an environment, a potentially large number of these states remains weakly or perfectly uncoupled from the environment, realising a new kind of bound states in the continuum. These states are strongly localized along particular directions of the lattice which, in the limit of strong coupling to the environment, leads to spatially-localized subradiant states.
We investigate the physics of quasicrystalline models in the presence of a uniform magnetic field, focusing on the presence and construction of topological states. This is done by using the Hofstadter model but with the sites and couplings denoted by the vertex model of the quasicrystal, giving the Hofstadter vertex model. We specifically consider two-dimensional quasicrystals made from tilings of two tiles with incommensurate areas, focusing on the five-fold Penrose and the eight-fold Ammann-Beenker tilings. This introduces two competing scales; the uniform magnetic field and the incommensurate scale of the cells of the tiling. Due to these competing scales the periodicity of the Hofstadter butterfly is destroyed. We observe the presence of topological edge states on the boundary of the system via the Bott index that exhibit two way transport along the edge. For the eight-fold tiling we also observe internal edge-like states with non-zero Bott index, which exhibit two way transport along this internal edge. The presence of these internal edge states is a new characteristic of quasicrystalline models in magnetic fields. We then move on to considering interacting systems. This is challenging, in part because exact diagonalization on a few tens of sites is not expected to be enough to accurately capture the physics of the quasicrystalline system, and in part because it is not clear how to construct topological flatbands having a large number of states. We show that these problems can be circumvented by building the models analytically, and in this way we construct models with Laughlin type fractional quantum Hall ground states.
The bulk-edge correspondence (BEC) refers to a one-to-one relation between the bulk and edge properties ubiquitous in topologically nontrivial systems. Depending on the setup, BEC manifests in different forms and govern the spectral and transport properties of topological insulators and semimetals. Although the topological pump is theoretically old, BEC in the pump has been established just recently [1] motivated by the state-of-the-art experiments using cold atoms [2,3]. The center of mass (CM) of a system with boundaries shows a sequence of quantized jumps in the adiabatic limit associated with the edge states. Although the bulk is adiabatic, the edge is inevitably non-adiabatic in the experimental setup or in any numerical simulations. Still the pumped charge is quantized and carried by the bulk. Its quantization is guaranteed by a compensation between the bulk and edges. We show that in the presence of disorder the pumped charge continues to be quantized despite the appearance of non-quantized jumps.
Since the discovery of the quantum anomalous Hall effect in the magnetically doped topological insulators (MTI) Cr:(Bi,Sb)$_2$Te$_3$ and V:(Bi,Sb)$_2$Te$_3$, the search for the exchange coupling mechanisms underlying the onset of ferromagnetism has been a central issue, and a variety of different scenarios have been put forward. By combining resonant photoemission, X-ray magnetic dichroism and multiplet ligand field theory, we determine the local electronic and magnetic configurations of V and Cr impurities in (Bi,Sb)$_2$Te$_3$. While strong pd hybridisation is found for both dopant types, their 3d densities of states show pronounced differences. State-of-the-art first-principles calculations show how these impurity states mediate characteristic short-range pd exchange interactions, whose strength sensitively varies with the position of the 3d states relative to the Fermi level. Measurements on films with varying host stoichiometry support this trend. Our results establish the essential role of impurity-state mediated exchange interactions in the magnetism of MTI.
Protected zero modes in quantum physics traditionally arise in the context of ground states of many-body Hamiltonians. Here we study the case where zero modes exist in the center of a reflection-symmetric many-body spectrum, giving rise to the notion of a protected infinite-temperature degeneracy. For a certain class of nonintegrable spin chains, we show that the number of zero modes is determined by a chiral index that grows exponentially with system size. We propose a dynamical protocol, feasible in ongoing experiments in Rydberg atom quantum simulators, to detect these many-body zero modes and their protecting spectral reflection symmetry. Finally, we consider whether the zero energy states obey the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis, as is expected of states in the middle of the many-body spectrum. We find intriguing differences in their eigenstate properties relative to those of nearby nonzero-energy eigenstates at finite system sizes.