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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05864 |
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| _version_ | 1866914179141599232 |
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| author | Zhang, Yuxuan Barkeshli, Maissam |
| author_facet | Zhang, Yuxuan Barkeshli, Maissam |
| contents | Recently, it has been established that Chern insulators possess an intrinsic two-dimensional electric polarization, despite having gapless edge states and non-localizable Wannier orbitals. This polarization, $\vec{P}_{\text{o}}$, can be defined in a many-body setting from various physical quantities, including dislocation charges, boundary charge distributions, and linear momentum. Importantly, there is a dependence on a choice of real-space origin $\text{o}$ within the unit cell. In contrast, Coh and Vanderbilt extended the single-particle Berry phase definition of polarization to Chern insulators by choosing an arbitrary point in momentum space, $\vec{k}_0$. In this paper, we unify these two approaches and show that when the real-space origin $\text{o}$ and momentum-space point $\vec{k}_0$ are appropriately chosen in relation to each other, the Berry phase and many-body definitions of polarization are equal. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05864 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Electric polarization in Chern insulators: Unifying many-body and single-particle approaches Zhang, Yuxuan Barkeshli, Maissam Strongly Correlated Electrons Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Quantum Physics Recently, it has been established that Chern insulators possess an intrinsic two-dimensional electric polarization, despite having gapless edge states and non-localizable Wannier orbitals. This polarization, $\vec{P}_{\text{o}}$, can be defined in a many-body setting from various physical quantities, including dislocation charges, boundary charge distributions, and linear momentum. Importantly, there is a dependence on a choice of real-space origin $\text{o}$ within the unit cell. In contrast, Coh and Vanderbilt extended the single-particle Berry phase definition of polarization to Chern insulators by choosing an arbitrary point in momentum space, $\vec{k}_0$. In this paper, we unify these two approaches and show that when the real-space origin $\text{o}$ and momentum-space point $\vec{k}_0$ are appropriately chosen in relation to each other, the Berry phase and many-body definitions of polarization are equal. |
| title | Electric polarization in Chern insulators: Unifying many-body and single-particle approaches |
| topic | Strongly Correlated Electrons Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics Quantum Physics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05864 |