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π-Flux Dirac Bosons and Topological Edge Excitations in a Bosonic Chiral p-Wave Superfluid
Zhi-Fang Xu1, Li You2,3, Andreas Hemmerich4,5
1MOE Key Laboratory of Fundamental Physical Quantities Measurements, School of Physics, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China.
Abstract:
We study the topological properties of elementary excitations in a staggered p_{x}±ip_{y} Bose-Einstein condensate realized in recent orbital optical lattice experiments. The condensate wave function may be viewed as a configuration space variant of the famous p_{x}+ip_{y} momentum space order parameter of strontium ruthenate superconductors. We show that its elementary excitation spectrum possesses Dirac bosons with π Berry flux. Remarkably, if we induce a population imbalance between the p_{x}+ip_{y} and p_{x}-ip_{y} condensate components, a gap opens up in the excitation spectrum resulting in a nonzero Chern invariant and topologically protected edge excitation modes. We give a detailed description of how our proposal can be implemented with standard experimental technology.
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