No abstract

We study the interplay between a uniaxial strain and the topology of the Haldane and the modified Haldane models which, respectively, exhibit chiral and antichiral edge modes. The latter were, recently, predicted by Colomés and Franz (Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 086603 (2018)) and expected to take place in the transition metal dichalcogenides. Using the continuum approximation and a tight-binding approach, we investigate the effect of the strain on the topological phases and the corresponding edge modes. We show that the strain could induce transitions between topological phases with opposite Chern numbers or tune a topological phase into a trivial one. As a consequence, the dispersions of the chiral and antichiral edge modes are found to be strain dependent. The strain may reverse the direction of propagation of these modes and eventually destroy them. This effect may be used for strain-tunable edge currents in topological insulators and two-dimensional transition metal dichalcogenides.

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Graphene can be turned into a semimetal with broken time-reversal symmetry by adding a valleydependent pseudo-scalar potential that shifts the Dirac point energies in opposite directions, as in the modified Haldane model. We consider a bilayer obtained by stacking two time-reversed copies of the modified Haldane model, where conduction and valence bands cross to give rise to a nodal line in each valleys. In the AB stacking, the interlayer hopping lifts the degeneracy of the nodal lines and induces a band repulsion, leading surprisingly to a chiral insulator with a Chern number C = ±2. As a consequence, a pair of chiral edge states appears at the boundaries of a ribbon bilayer geometry. In contrast, the AA stacking does not show nontrivial topological phases. We discuss possible experimental implementations of our results.