Z2 antiferromagnetic topological insulators with broken C4 symmetry

A two-dimensional topological insulator may arise in a centrosymmetric commensurate Néel antiferromagnet (AF), where staggered magnetization breaks both the elementary translation and time reversal, but retains their product as a symmetry. Fang et al. [6] proposed an expression for a Z2 topological invariant to characterize such systems. Here, we show that this expression does not allow to detect all the existing phases if a certain lattice symmetry is lacking. We implement numerical techniques to diagnose topological phases of a toy Hamiltonian, and verify our results by computing the Chern numbers of degenerate bands, and also by explicitly constructing the edge states, thus illustrating the efficiency of the method.