Topological insulators on fractal lattices: A general principle of construction

TL;DR

This paper develops three general methods to construct topological insulators on fractal lattices, demonstrating the realization of strong and crystalline Chern insulators on Sierpiński carpet fractals, thus providing a foundation for topological phases on fractals.

Contribution

It introduces three novel approaches to build real space Hamiltonians on fractal lattices from parent crystal models, enabling the study of topological phases in fractal geometries.

Findings

Successful construction of strong and crystalline Chern insulators on Sierpiński carpet fractals.

Framework applicable to a broad class of fractal lattices and topological phases.

Lays groundwork for future exploration of topological matter on fractal geometries.

Abstract

Fractal lattices, featuring the self-similarity symmetry, are often geometric descents of parent crystals, possessing all their discrete symmetries (such as rotations and reflections) except the translational ones. Here, we formulate three different general approaches to construct real space Hamiltonian on a fractal lattice starting from the Bloch Hamiltonian on the parent crystal, fostering for example strong and crystalline topological insulators resulting from the interplay between the nontrivial geometry of the underlying electronic wave functions and the crystal symmetries. As a demonstrative example, we consider a generalized square lattice Chern insulator model and within the framework of all three methods we successfully showcase incarnations of strong and crystalline Chern insulators on the Sierpi\'nski carpet fractal lattices. The proposed theoretical framework thus lays a generic foundation to build a tower of topological phases on the landscape of fractal lattices.