Geometrical Berry phase is recognized as having profound implications for the properties of electronic systems. Over the last decade, Berry phase has been essential to our understanding of new materials, including graphene and topological insulators.
The Berry phase can be accessed via its contribution to the phase mismatch in quantum oscillation experiments, where electrons accumulate a phase as they traverse closed cyclotron orbits in momentum space. The high-temperature cuprate superconductors are a class of materials where the Berry phase is thus far unknown despite the large body of existing quantum oscillations data. In this report we present a systematic Berry phase analysis of Shubnikov - de Haas measurements on the hole-doped cuprates YBa$_2$Cu$_3$O$_{y}$, YBa$_2$Cu$_4$O$_8$, HgBa$_2$CuO$_{4 + delta}$, and the electron-doped cuprate Nd$_{2-x}$Ce$_x$CuO$_4$. For the hole-doped materials, a trivial Berry phase of 0 mod $2pi$ is systematically observed whereas the electron-doped Nd$_{2-x}$Ce$_x$CuO$_4$ exhibits a significant non-zero Berry phase. These observations set constraints on the nature of the high-field normal state of the cuprates and points towards contrasting behaviour between hole-doped and electron-doped materials. We discuss this difference in light of recent developments related to charge density-wave and broken time-reversal symmetry states.
The goal of this paper is to provide an intuitive and useful tool for analyzing the impurity bound state problem. We develop a semiclassical approach and apply it to an impurity in two dimensional systems with parabolic or Dirac like bands. Our metho
d consists of reducing a higher dimensional problem into a sum of one dimensional ones using the two dimensional Green functions as a guide. We then analyze the one dimensional effective systems in the spirit of the wave function matching method as in the standard 1d quantum model. We demonstrate our method on two dimensional models with parabolic and Dirac-like dispersion, with the later specifically relevant to topological insulators.
We explore the possibility of inducing a topological insulator phase in a honeycomb lattice lacking spin-orbit interaction using a metallic (or Fermi gas) environment. The lattice and the metallic environment interact through a density-density intera
ction without particle tunneling, and integrating out the metallic environment produces a honeycomb sheet with in-plane oscillating long-ranged interactions. We find the ground state of the interacting system in a variational mean-field method and show that the Fermi wave vector, kF, of the metal determines which phase occurs in the honeycomb lattice sheet. This is analogous to the Ruderman-Kittel-Kasuya-Yosida (RKKY) mechanism in which the metals kF determines the interaction profile as a function of the distance. Tuning kF and the interaction strength may lead to a variety of ordered phases, including a topological insulator and anomalous quantum-hall states with complex next-nearest-neighbor hopping, as in the Haldane and the Kane-Mele model. We estimate the required range of parameters needed for the topological state and find that the Fermi vector of the metallic gate should be of the order of 3Pi/8a (with a being the graphene lattice constant). The net coupling between the layers, which includes screening in the metal, should be of the order of the honeycomb lattice bandwidth. This configuration should be most easily realized in a cold-atoms setting with two interacting Fermionic species.
A graphene nanoribbon with zigzag edges has a gapped magnetic ground state with an antiferromagnetic inter-edge superexchange interaction. We present a theory based on asymptotic properties of the Dirac-model ribbon wavefunction which predicts $W^{-2
}$ and $W^{-1}$ ribbon-width dependencies for the superexchange interaction strength and the charge gap respectively. We find that, unlike the case of conventional atomic scale superexchange, opposite spin-orientations on opposite edges of the ribbon are favored by both kinetic and interaction energies.
