Second-order topological solitonic insulator in a breathing square lattice of magnetic vortices

Abstract

We study the topological phase in a dipolar-coupled two-dimensional breathing square lattice of magnetic vortices. By evaluating the quantized Chern number and ${\mathbb{Z}}_{4}$ Berry phase, we obtain the phase diagram and identify that the second-order topological corner states appear only when the ratio of alternating bond lengths goes beyond a critical value. Interestingly, we uncover three corner states at different frequencies ranging from subgigahertz to tens of gigahertz by solving the generalized Thiele's equation, which has no counterpart in natural materials. We show that the emerging corner states are topologically protected by a generalized chiral symmetry of the quadripartite lattice, leading to particular robustness against disorder and defects. Full micromagnetic simulations confirm theoretical predictions with great agreement. A vortex-based display device is designed as a demonstration of the real-world application of the second-order magnetic topological insulator. Our findings provide a route for realizing symmetry-protected multiband corner states that are promising to achieve spintronic higher-order topological devices.