Symmetry-protected topological phases of alkaline-earth cold fermionic atoms in one dimension

Understand

We investigate the existence of symmetry-protected topological phases in one-dimensional alkaline-earth cold fermionic atoms with general half-integer nuclear spin I at half filling.

• In this respect, some orbital degrees of freedom are required.
• They can be introduced by considering either the metastable excited state of alkaline-earth atoms or the p-band of the optical lattice.
• Using complementary techniques, we show that SU(2) Haldane topological phases are stabilised from these orbital degrees of freedom.