Square-root higher-order topological insulator on a decorated honeycomb lattice

Abstract

Square-root topological insulators are recently-proposed intriguing topological insulators, where the topologically nontrivial nature of Bloch wave functions is inherited from the square of the Hamiltonian. In this paper, we propose that higher-order topological insulators can also have their square-root descendants, which we term square-root higher-order topological insulators. There, emergence of in-gap corner states is inherited from the squared Hamiltonian which hosts higher-order topology. As an example of such systems, we investigate the tight-binding model on a decorated honeycomb lattice, whose squared Hamiltonian includes a breathing kagome-lattice model, a well-known example of higher-order topological insulators. We show that the in-gap corner states appear at finite energies, which coincides with the non-trivial bulk polarization. We further show that the existence of in-gap corner states results in characteristic single-particle dynamics, namely, setting the initial state to be localized at the corner, the particle stays at the corner even after a long time. Such characteristic dynamics may experimentally be detectable in photonic crystals.