Symmetry and Quantum Geometry in Bloch Bands

Abstract

Quantum geometric quantities have featured heavily in the discussion of the properties of quantum systems in recent years. Among quantities most commonly discussed is the variance of Berry curvature and the integral of the trace of the quantum metric tensor. Despite their usefulness, it is known that they suffer from one significant complication: for a tight-binding model, the quantum geometric quantities depend not only on the parameters of the tight-binding model itself, but also the real space geometry of the tight-binding model, the so-called "orbital embedding". One explicitly geometry-independent quantity is therefore the minimal value of the quantum geometric quantity out of all possible real space geometries. In this work, we demonstrate that, if the tight-binding model is compatible with certain spatial symmetries, then the real space geometry that minimizes the variance of the Berry curvature or the integral of the trace of the quantum metric tensor must obey all those spatial symmetries. We further show that the statement is applicable to systems with magnetic translation symmetries and other composite symmetries, with implications for the quantum geometry of the Hofstadter model.