Realistic Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Neutral Atoms
Abstract
We lay out an experiment to realize time-reversal invariant topological insulators in alkali atomic gases. We introduce an original method to synthesize a gauge field in the near-field of an atom-chip, which effectively mimics the effects of spin-orbit coupling and produces quantum spin-Hall states. We also propose a feasible scheme to engineer sharp boundaries where the hallmark edge states are localized. Our multi-band system has a large parameter space exhibiting a variety of quantum phase transitions between topological and normal insulating phases. Due to their remarkable versatility, cold-atom systems are ideally suited to realize topological states of matter and drive the development of topological quantum computing.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1011.3909,
title = {Realistic Time-Reversal Invariant Topological Insulators With Neutral Atoms},
author = {N. Goldman and I. Satija and P. Nikolic and A. Bermudez and M. A. Martin-Delgado and M. Lewenstein and I. B. Spielman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1011.3909},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures, Accepted in Phys. Rev. Lett. (Nov 2010)