Tunable Chern insulator with shaken optical lattices

Albert Verdeny, Florian Mintert

Published 2015-02-25, updated 2015-04-13Version 2

Driven optical lattices permit the engineering of effective dynamics with well-controllable tunneling properties. We describe the realization of a tunable a Chern insulator by driving particles on a shaken hexagonal lattice with optimally designed polychromatic driving forces. Its implementation does not require shallow lattices, which favors the study strongly-interacting phases with non-trivial topology.