π Berry phase and topological excitation in interacting boson-fermion mixtures

The topological property of a boson-fermion mixture in a one-dimensional optical superlattice is studied and the topological insulating phase of an interacting boson-fermion mixture characterized by a nontrivial Berry phase is identified. The single-particle and boson-fermion exchanging excitation spectrums are calculated and we identify the boson-fermion exchanging excitation as the gapless topological excitation in the topological phase of the mixture. The different kinds of excitations are explained explicitly from the competition among the bulk gap, the on-site boson-boson, and boson-fermion interactions. The Hamiltonian studied has been partly realized in the state-of-art cold atom experiments, and the results are very relevant to the experiments.