Eur. Phys. J. D (2012) 66: 88
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2012-20484-y

Regular Article

Spectrum of a particle on a polyhedron enclosing a synthetic magnetic monopole

Department of Physics, Bilkent University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey

^a e-mail: oktel@fen.bilkent.edu.tr

Received: 18 August 2011
Published online: 19 April 2012

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.