Mirror winding number and helical edge modes in honeycomb lattice with hopping-energy texture

Abstract

We illustrate possible topological phases in honeycomb lattice with textures in electron hopping energy between nearest-neighboring sites and show that they are characterized by the mirror winding number intimately related to the chiral (or sublattice) symmetry. Analytic wave functions of zero-energy edge modes in ribbon geometry are provided, which are classified into even and odd sectors with respect to the mirror operation with the mirror plane perpendicular to the edge, and evolve into the topological helical edge states at finite momenta. Intriguingly our results demonstrate that in order to achieve the topological phase one can decorate the edge in a way adaptive to the bulk hopping texture. This paves a new way to tailoring graphene in the topological point of view.

6 pages