Interaction-Driven Topological Insulator in Fermionic Cold Atoms on an Optical Lattice: A Design with a Density Functional Formalism

TL;DR

This paper proposes a method to realize a topological Mott insulator in fermionic cold atoms on an optical lattice by using a density functional approach to induce spontaneous symmetry breaking through interactions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel design with a spin-dependent potential and density functional theory to achieve a topological insulator driven by interactions in cold atom systems.

Findings

Demonstrates a phase transition to a topological Mott insulator.

Shows the feasibility of interaction-driven topological phases in cold atoms.

Extends density functional theory to include non-collinear spin structures.

Abstract

We design an interaction-driven topological insulator for fermionic cold atoms in an optical lattice, that is, we pose the question of whether we can realize in a continuous space a spontaneous symmetry breaking induced by the inter-atom interaction into a topological Chern insulator. Such a state, sometimes called a "topological Mott insulator", has yet to be realized in solid-state systems, since this requires, in the tight-binding model, large offsite interactions on top of a small onsite interaction. Here we overcome the difficulty by introducing a spin-dependent potential, where a spin-selective occupation of fermions in $A$ and $B$ sublattices makes the onsite interaction Pauli-forbidden, while a sizeable inter-site interaction is achieved by a shallow optical potential with a large overlap between neighboring Wannier orbitals. This puts the system away from the tight-binding model, so that we adopt the density functional theory for cold-atoms, here extended to accommodate non-collinear spin structures emerging in the topological regime, to quantitatively demonstrate the phase transition to the topological Mott insulator.