Non-vanishing Berry Phase in Chiral Insulators

The binary compounds FeSi, RuSi, and OsSi are chiral insulators crystallizing in the space group P2_13 which is cubic. By means of ab initio calculations we find for these compounds a non-vanishing electronic Berry phase, the sign of which depends on the handedness of the crystal. There is thus the possibility that the Berry phase signals the existence of a macroscopic electric polarization due to the electrons. We show that this is indeed so if a small external magnetic field is applied in the [111]-direction. The electric polarization is oscillatory in the magnetic field and possesses a signature that distinguishes the handedness of the crystal. Our findings add to the discussion of topological classifications of insulators and are significant for spintronics applications, and in particular, for a deeper understanding of skyrmions in insulators

Measure of multipartite entanglement with computable lower bounds

In this paper, we present a measure of multipartite entanglement ($k$-nonseparable), $k$-ME concurrence $C_{k-\mathrm{ME}}(\rho)$ that unambiguously detects all $k$-nonseparable states in arbitrary dimensions, where the special case, 2-ME concurrence $C_{2-\mathrm{ME}}(\rho)$, is a measure of genuine multipartite entanglement. The new measure $k$-ME concurrence satisfies important characteristics of an entanglement measure including entanglement monotone, vanishing on $k$-separable states, convexity, subadditivity and strictly greater than zero for all $k$-nonseparable states. Two powerful lower bounds on this measure are given. These lower bounds are experimentally implementable without quantum state tomography and are easily computable as no optimization or eigenvalue evaluation is needed. We illustrate detailed examples in which the given bounds perform better than other known detection criteria.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure