Litcius/Paper detail

Intraband Collective Excitations and Spatial Correlations in Fractional Chern Insulators

Tobias Wolf, Yung-Chun Chao, A. H. MacDonald, Jung-Jung Su

2025Physical Review Letters11 citationsDOI

Abstract

The low-energy collective excitations of semiconductors and insulators often couple strongly to light, allowing them to be probed optically. We argue here that in fractional Chern insulators intraband collective excitations are dark in the sense that they couple anomalously weakly to light. Using this property, we establish a general relationship between flat-band Chern numbers, quantum geometry, and spatial correlations in fractional-Chern-insulator states.

Topics & Concepts

QuasiparticlePhysicsCondensed matter physicsChern classQuantum Hall effectSemiconductorFractional quantum Hall effectInsulator (electricity)Quantum mechanicsElectronQuantum spin Hall effectGeometryMathematicsSuperconductivityOptoelectronicsQuantum and electron transport phenomenaTopological Materials and PhenomenaCold Atom Physics and Bose-Einstein Condensates