Inverse design of higher-order photonic topological insulators

Observation of photonic anomalous Floquet topological insulators

Topological insulators are a new class of materials that exhibit robust and scatter-free transport along their edges - independently of the fine details of the system and of the edge - due to topological protection. To classify the topological character of two-dimensional systems without additional symmetries, one commonly uses Chern numbers, as their sum computed from all bands below a specifi...

Topological order parameters for interacting topological insulators.

We propose a topological order parameter for interacting topological insulators, expressed in terms of the full Green's functions of the interacting system. We show that it is exactly quantized for a time-reversal invariant topological insulator, and it can be experimentally measured through the topological magneto-electric effect. This topological order parameter can be applied to both interac...

Self-localized states in photonic topological insulators.

We propose solitons in a photonic topological insulator: self-localized wave packets forming topological edge states residing in the bulk of a nonlinear photonic topological insulator. These self-forming entities exhibit, despite being in the bulk, the property of unidirectional transport, similar to the transport their linear counterparts display on the edge of a topological insulator. In the ...

Sufficient Conditions for Topological Order in Insulators

– We prove the existence of low energy excitations in insulating systems at general filling factor under certain conditions, and discuss in which cases these may be identified as topological excitations. In the specific case of half-filling this proof provides a significantly shortened proof of the recent higher dimensional Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem. The classic 1961 result of Lieb, Schultz, ...

Topological insulators