Now published in PRR with collaborators from ICFO, Barcelona! In the recent years, great effort has been devoted toward the study of symmetry-protected topological phases. We show that the bond order wave (BOW) induced by frustration between competing couplings has a nontrivial topological sector in the presence of chiral symmetry. We reveal its topological nature by finding a nonzero string order correlator and a degenerate entanglement spectrum, and design a realistic experimental scheme involving magnetic atoms trapped in an optical lattice. The latter paves the way towards an efficient quantum simulation of topological phases in many-body quantum systems.
The paper can be accessed here: Phys. Rev. Research, and the pre-print here: arXiv