English

Equilibrium currents in chiral systems with non-zero Chern number

Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics 2014-07-23 v1

Abstract

We describe simple quantum-mechanical approach to calculating equilibrium particle current along the edge of a system with non-trivial band spectrum topology. The approach does not require any a priori knowledge of the band topology and, as a matter of fact, treats topological and non-topological contributions to the edge currents on the same footing. We illustrate its usefulness by demonstrating the existence of `topologically non-trivial' particle currents along the edges of three different physical systems: two-dimensional electron gas with spin-orbit coupling and Zeeman magnetic field, surface state of a topological insulator, and kagome antiferromagnet with Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. We describe relation of our results to the notion of orbital magnetization.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1404.7535,
  title  = {Equilibrium currents in chiral systems with non-zero Chern number},
  author = {E. G. Mishchenko and O. A. Starykh},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1404.7535},
  year   = {2014}
}

Comments

8 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-22T04:02:26.500Z