Exploring Interacting Topological Insulators with Ultracold Atoms: the Synthetic Creutz-Hubbard Model

Understanding the robustness of topological phases of matter in the presence of strong interactions and synthesizing novel strongly correlated topological materials lie among the most important and difficult challenges of modern theoretical and experimental physics. In this work, we present a complete theoretical analysis of the synthetic Creutz-Hubbard ladder, which is a paradigmatic model that provides a neat playground to address these challenges. We give special attention to the competition of correlated topological phases and orbital quantum magnetism in the regime of strong interactions. These results are, furthermore, confirmed and extended by extensive numerical simulations. Moreover, we propose how to experimentally realize this model in a synthetic ladder made of two internal states of ultracold fermionic atoms in a one-dimensional optical lattice. Our work paves the way towards quantum simulators of interacting topological insulators with cold atoms.