The theory of topological-topological flat bands

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new topological condition for flat bands that removes singularities at band touching points, enabling well-defined topological invariants and leading to the realization of topological-topological flat bands with various invariants.

Contribution

It proposes a novel topological condition that ensures well-defined invariants in flat bands, and constructs top$^2$-flat bands with nontrivial topological properties in 2D and 3D.

Findings

Top$^2$-flat bands have nontrivial invariants like Chern and $ ext{Z}_2$ invariants.

Enforcing the new condition removes singularities at band touching points.

Interactions can induce topological insulators from top$^2$-flat bands.

Abstract

Electronic flat bands have localized Wannier-like orbitals as zero modes. In the Lieb or the kagome models, the localized orbitals satisfy a topological condition that entails two non-contractible loop eigenstates along $x/y$-axis in real space, and one topological band touching point with other bands in momentum space. In these topological-flat bands, the Bloch state at the touching point is ill-defined, and so is any topological invariant for the entire band. We propose a new topological condition that the loop states in different directions be linearly dependent. Its satisfaction removes the singularity at the band touching point, and enforces nontrivial, well-defined topological invariants. Enforcing the new condition, we obtain topological-topological (top$^2$)-flat bands in 2D and 3D that have nontrivial invariants including the Chern numbers, the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ invariants, and the topological-crystalline invariants. Under small, generic interactions, top$^2$-flat bands flow to correlated topological insulators with a dynamically generated, symmetric mass term; and specially designed interacting models can have top$^2$-flat bands as exact zero modes.