Four-Dimensional Topological Insulators with Nodal-Line Boundary States

Abstract

Conventional topological insulators and superconductors have topologically protected nodal points on their boundaries, and the recent interests in nodal-line semimetals only concerned bulk band structures. Here, we present a novel four-dimensional topological insulator protected by an anti-unitary reflection symmetry, whose boundary band has a single $PT$-symmetric nodal line with double topological charges. Inspired by the recent experimental realization of the four-dimensional quantum Hall effect, we also propose a cold-atom system which realizes the novel topological insulator with tunable parameters as extra dimensions.