Effective description of Chern insulators

Abstract

The Berry curvature in Chern insulators appears to be a non-gauge-invariant quantity and does not immediately allow local length characterization. However, in two examples of 2- and 3-band models that we discuss, we find high-symmetry points in the Brillouin zone that have Berry curvature invariant under diagonal gauge transformations, and may serve as expansion points of geometrical description. On the basis of the geometrical description, in the case of Dirac based 2-band Chern insulators like Haldane model we conclude that the characteristic length based on the value of the Berry curvature at the expansion point plays the role of the magnetic length in the expression for the Hall viscosity. In the case of 2-band models the characteristic "cyclotron" spin is equal to 1/2, while in the 3-band kagome case this spin is likely non-quantized and non-universal.