Spectrum of a particle on a polyhedron enclosing a synthetic magnetic monopole
Date
Authors
Advisor
Instructor
Source Title
Print ISSN
Electronic ISSN
Publisher
Volume
Issue
Pages
Language
Type
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Abstract
We consider a single particle hopping on a tight binding lattice formed by the vertices of a regular polyhedron and discuss the effect of a magnetic monopole enclosed in the polyhedron. The presence of the monopole induces phases on the hopping terms, given by Peierls substitution. By requiring the flux through each face of a regular polyhedron to be the same, Dirac's quantization condition is obtained in this discrete setting. For each regular polyhedron, we calculate the energy spectrum for an arbitrary value of the flux through a Dirac string coming in from one of the faces. We find that the energy levels are degenerate only when the flux through the Dirac string corresponds to a quantized monopole. We show that the degeneracies in the presence of the monopole can be classified using the double group of the symmetry of the polyhedron and label all energy levels with corresponding irreducible representations.