Topological invariants for interface modes

Abstract

This article concerns topologically non-trivial interface Hamiltonians that find many applications in materials science and geophysical fluid flows. The non-trivial topology manifests itself in the existence of topologically protected, asymmetric edge states at the interface between two two-dimensional half spaces. The asymmetric transport is characterized by a quantized interface conductivity. The objective of this article is to compute such a conductivity and show its stability under perturbations. We present two methods. The first one computes the conductivity using the winding number of branches of absolutely continuous spectrum of the interface Hamiltonian. This calculation is independent of any bulk properties but requires a sufficient understanding of the spectral decomposition of the Hamiltonian. In the fluid flow setting, it also applies in cases where the so-called bulk-interface correspondence fails. The second method establishes a bulk-interface correspondence between the interface conductivity and a so-called bulk-difference invariant. We introduce the bulk-difference invariants characterizing pairs of half spaces. We then relate the interface conductivity to the bulk-difference invariant by means of a Fedosov–Hörmander formula, which computes the index of a related Fredholm operator and is obtained using semiclassical calculus. The two methods are used to compute invariants for representative 2 × 2 and 3 × 3 systems of equations that appear in the applications.