High-order topological insulators from high-dimensional Chern insulators

Abstract

Topological insulators are a novel state of matter that share a common feature: their spectral bands are associated with a nonlocal integer-valued index, commonly manifesting through quantized bulk phenomena and robust boundary effects. In this work, we demonstrate using dimensional reduction that high-order topological insulators are descendants from a chiral semimetal in higher dimensions. Specifically, we analyze the descendants of an ancestor four-dimensional Chern insulator in the limit where it becomes chiral and show their relation to two-dimensional second-order topological insulators. Correspondingly, the quantization of the charge accumulation at the corners of the 2D descendants is obtained and related to the topological indices -- the 1st and 2nd Chern numbers -- of the ancestor model. Our approach provides a connection between the boundary states of high-order topological insulators and topological pumps -- the latter being dynamical realizations of high-dimensional Chern insulators.