Abstract
The possibility of engineering experimentally viable systems that realize gauge fluxes within plaquettes of hopping have been subject of search for decades due to vast amounts of theoretical study. This is of particular interest for topological band insulators, where it is known that such fluxes bind protected mid-gap states. These modes can hybridize in extended flux lattices, giving rise to semi-metallic bands that are highly tunable. We demonstrate that within artificial materials, local $\pi$-fluxes can be naturally realized. Consequently, we provide concrete set-ups to access this physics and analyze similar self-organized band structures and physical properties. Our work therefore does not only pinpoint simple systems exhibiting flat bands, but also opens up a route to study flux lattice models and associated effective theories in a novel scene.
Highlights
Gauge fluxes have been associated with many exotic physical properties studied over several decades, from, e.g., visons in lattice gauge theories [1] to quasiparticle descriptions in quantum Hall systems [2]
We have shown that π -flux modes, characterizing topological band insulators, can be naturally realized in artificial materials
Given the direct implementabilty of artificial materials, this creates a promising scene to study π -flux modes as well as the highly tuneable bands that arise from their hybridization
Summary
The possibility of engineering experimentally viable systems that realize gauge fluxes within plaquettes of hopping has been the subject of a search for decades due to vast amounts of theoretical study. This is of particular interest for topological band insulators, where it is known that such fluxes bind protected midgap states. These modes can hybridize in extended flux lattices, giving rise to semimetallic bands that are highly tunable. Our work pinpoints simple systems exhibiting flat bands and opens up a route to study flux lattice models and associated effective theories
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