Polarization textures in crystal supercells with topological bands

Abstract

Two-dimensional materials are a highly tunable platform for studying the momentum space topology of the electronic wavefunctions and real space topology in terms of skyrmions, merons, and vortices of an order parameter. Such textures for electronic polarization can exist in moiré heterostructures. A quantum-mechanical definition of local polarization textures in insulating supercells was recently proposed. Here, we propose a definition for local polarization that is also valid for systems with topologically nontrivial bands. We introduce semilocal hybrid polarizations, which are valid even when the Wannier functions in a system cannot be made exponentially localized in all dimensions. We use this definition to explicitly show that nontrivial real-space polarization textures can exist in topologically nontrivial systems with nonzero Chern number under (1) an external superlattice potential, and (2) under a stacking-induced moiré potential. In the latter, we find that while the magnitude of the local polarization decreases discontinuously across a topological phase transition from trivial to topologically nontrivial, the polarization does not completely vanish. Our findings suggest that band topology and real-space polar topology may coexist in real materials. Published by the American Physical Society 2024