Fractional mode charge in Cn-symmetric higher-order topological crystalline insulators

Abstract

The measurement of topological insulators is usually achieved by measuring spectra, which is inadequate in higher-order topological insulators because the separation of bandgaps may be blurred, such as body boundaries and corner state hybridization, and the above measurement requires that the energy of the topological mode must be located in the bulk bandgap to be measured. Recent experiments have shown a strong relationship between the fractional mode charge and the location of the Wannier center in the crystal body. The fractional quantization of the corner charge originates from the filling anomaly, and the fractional mode charge can be calculated from experimental measurements of the local density of states to describe the topological state of the system, which has been demonstrated in optical systems. We have achieved a similar effect in acoustics by utilizing a coupled acoustic-cavity system featuring C3, C4, and C6 symmetries for simulation. Furthermore, we extended our study to 3D third-order topological crystalline insulators to validate the fractional-corner charge approach. The simulation and theoretical results demonstrate that the fractional mode charge can clearly identify the high-order topology, even without gap states.