It is well known that one signature of the three-dimensional electron topological insulator is the Witten effect: if the system is coupled to a compact electromagnetic gauge field, a monopole in the bulk acquires a half-odd-integer polarization charge. In the present work, we propose a corresponding phenomenon for the topological insulator of bosons in three dimensions protected by particle number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. We claim that although a monopole inside a topological insulator of bosons can remain electrically neutral, its statistics are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic. We demonstrate that this ``statistical Witten effect'' directly implies that if the surface of the topological insulator is neither gapless, nor spontaneously breaks the symmetry, it necessarily supports an intrinsic two-dimensional topological order. Moreover, the surface properties can not be fully realized in a purely two-dimensional system. We also confirm that the surface phases of the bosonic topological insulator proposed by Vishwanath and Senthil [Phys. Rev. X 3, 011016 (2013)] provide a consistent termination of a bulk exhibiting the statistical Witten effect. In a forthcoming paper, we will provide an explicit field-theoretic, lattice-regularized construction of the three-dimensional topological insulator of bosons, employing a parton decomposition and subsequent condensation of parton-monopole composites.
It is well known that one signature of the three-dimensional electron topological insulator is the Witten effect: if the system is coupled to a compact electromagnetic gauge field, a monopole in the bulk acquires a half-odd-integer polarization charge. In the present work, we propose a corresponding phenomenon for the topological insulator of bosons in three dimensions protected by particle number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. We claim that although a monopole inside a topological insulator of bosons can remain electrically neutral, its statistics are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic. We demonstrate that this ``statistical Witten effect'' directly implies that if the surface of the topological insulator is neither gapless, nor spontaneously breaks the symmetry, it necessarily supports an intrinsic two-dimensional topological order. Moreover, the surface properties can not be fully realized in a purely two-dimensional system. We also confirm that the surface phases of the bosonic topological insulator proposed by Vishwanath and Senthil [Phys. Rev. X 3, 011016 (2013)] provide a consistent termination of a bulk exhibiting the statistical Witten effect. In a forthcoming paper, we will provide an explicit field-theoretic, lattice-regularized construction of the three-dimensional topological insulator of bosons, employing a parton decomposition and subsequent condensation of parton-monopole composites.
It is well-known that one signature of the three-dimensional electron topological insulator is the Witten eect: if the system is coupled to a compact electromagnetic gauge eld, a monopole in the bulk acquires a half-odd-integer polarization charge. In the present work, we propose a corresponding phenomenon for the topological insulator of bosons in 3d protected by particle number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. We claim that although a monopole inside a topological insulator of bosons can remain electrically neutral, its statistics are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic. We demonstrate that this \statistical Witten eect
We study a topological phase of interacting bosons in (3 þ 1) dimensions that is protected by charge conservation and time-reversal symmetry.We present an explicit lattice model that realizes this phase and that can be studied in sign-free Monte Carlo simulations.The idea behind our model is to bind bosons to topological defects called hedgehogs.We determine the phase diagram of the model and identify a phase where such bound states are proliferated.In this phase, we observe a Witten effect in the bulk whereby an external monopole binds half of the elementary boson charge, which confirms that it is a bosonic topological insulator.We also study the boundary between the topological insulator and a trivial insulator.We find a surface phase diagram that includes exotic superfluids, a topologically ordered phase, and a phase with a Hall effect quantized to one-half of the value possible in a purely two-dimensional system.We also present models that realize symmetry-enriched topologically ordered phases by binding multiple hedgehogs to each boson; these phases show charge fractionalization and intrinsic topological order as well as a fractional Witten effect.
A three-dimensional electron topological insulator (ETI) is a phase of matter protected by particle-number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. It was previously believed that the surface of an ETI must be gapless unless one of these symmetries is broken. A well-known symmetry-preserving, gapless surface termination of an ETI supports an odd number of Dirac cones. In this paper, we deduce a symmetry-respecting, gapped surface termination of an ETI, which carries an intrinsic two-dimensional (2d) topological order, $\text{Moore-Read}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\mathrm{U}{(1)}_{\ensuremath{-}2}$. The Moore-Read sector supports non-Abelian charge 1/4 anyons, while the Abelian, $\mathrm{U}{(1)}_{\ensuremath{-}2}$, (antisemion) sector is electrically neutral. Time-reversal symmetry is implemented in this surface phase in a highly nontrivial way. Moreover, it is impossible to realize this phase strictly in 2d, simultaneously preserving its implementation of both the particle-number and time-reversal symmetries. A one-dimensional (1d) edge on the ETI surface between the topologically ordered phase and the topologically trivial time-reversal-broken phase with a Hall conductivity ${\ensuremath{\sigma}}_{xy}=1/2$ carries a right-moving neutral Majorana mode, a right-moving bosonic charge mode, and a left-moving bosonic neutral mode. The topologically ordered phase is separated from the surface superconductor by a direct second-order phase transition in the XY∗ universality class, which is driven by the condensation of a charge 1/2 boson, when approached from the topologically ordered side, and proliferation of a flux $4\ensuremath{\pi}\phantom{\rule{0.28em}{0ex}}(2hc/e)$ vortex, when approached from the superconducting side. In addition, we prove that time-reversal invariant (interacting) electron insulators with no intrinsic topological order and electromagnetic response characterized by a $\ensuremath{\theta}$ angle, $\ensuremath{\theta}=\ensuremath{\pi}$, do not exist if the electrons transform as Kramers singlets under time reversal.
Recently, there is a considerable study on gapped symmetric phases of bosons that do not break any symmetry. Even without symmetry breaking, the bosons can still be in many exotic new states of matter, such as symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases, which are short-range entangled and symmetry-enriched topological (SET) phases, which are long-range entangled. It is well known that noninteracting fermionic topological insulators are SPT states protected by time-reversal symmetry and U(1) fermion number conservation symmetry. In this paper, we construct three-dimensional exotic phases of bosons with time-reversal symmetry and boson number conservation U(1) symmetry by means of fermionic projective construction. We first construct an algebraic bosonic insulator, which is a symmetric bosonic state with an emergent U(1) gapless gauge field. We then obtain many gapped bosonic states that do not break the time-reversal symmetry and boson number conservation via proper dyon condensations. We identify the constructed states by calculating the allowed electric and magnetic charges of their excitations, as well as the statistics and the symmetric transformation properties of those excitations. This allows us to show that our constructed states can be trivial SPT states (i.e., trivial Mott insulators of bosons with symmetry), nontrivial SPT states (i.e., bosonic topological insulators), and SET states (i.e., fractional bosonic topological insulators). In nontrivial SPT states, the elementary monopole (carrying zero electric charge but unit magnetic charge) and elementary dyon (carrying both unit electric charge and unit magnetic charge) are fermionic and bosonic, respectively. In SET states, intrinsic excitations may carry fractional charge.
Topological phases of matter are purely quantum mechanical and have no classical analogue. Most phases in nature can be classified and studied classically through the concept of symmetry breaking and its theoretical description, Landau-Ginzburg field theory. In contrast to the general wisdom of Landau-Ginzburg field theory, the topological phases share the same symmetry as a trivial insulator and still are different phases. Having gapped spectrum in bulk, they support a metallic edge excition robust against symmetry-respecting perturbation or an emergent fractional excitation in bulk. Following after fractional quantum Hall fluids, many topologically orderd phases, such as spin liquids and topological insulators, have been found and studied. Spin liquids are disordered phases of frustrated antiferromagnets and do not freeze and order even at the lowest temperature. They support an electrically neutral spin-1/2 excitation, which does not exist in a microscopic scale, with emergent dynamical gauge field in bulk and do not have an adiabatic path to a trivial paramagnet phase. The topological insulators are time-reversal symmetric band insulators which cannot evolve smoothly into a trivial insulator with the symmetry, and they have been intensely studied theoretically and experimetally for the last decade. Though the topological insulators are inherently non-interacting systems, they have exotic gapless edge and surface states which demonstrate many interesting quantum phenomena such as fractionalization, axionic electromagnetism, and half quantum Hall effect. In this thesis, we study various quantum phenomena of the topological phases, mainly of the topological insulator and its close relatives in which the physics of spin liquids has been merged into. As they are intrinsically quantum many-body states, the quantum field theory is an invaluable tool to explore the venue of the phases and will be used thorougly in this work. First, we present a topological field theoretic description of the topological insulators and translational symmetric Z2 spin liquid. We demostrate that abelian BF theory is an effective field theory for the two and three dimensional topological insulators. We show that the phenomenologies of BF theory are consistent with those of the topological insulators such as gapless edge and surface excitations and response functions to external gauge field. The same form of the BF theory is also applicable to study the certain classes of Z2 spin liquids with the gapless edge states. We closely examine the possible gapless edge theory of the BF theory and the translational symmetric spin liquids, and we show that the effective BF theories capture the bulk properties as well as the gapless edge spectrum of the spin liquid. Also we discuss the zero-temperature phase diagram of a thin film three dimensional topological insulators with two competing mass terms: time-reversal symmetric exciton condensation and time-reversal symmetry breaking Zeeman effect. There are two phases, quantum spin Hall phase and quantum anomalous Hall phase, and both phases support fractional excitations. We derive an effective topological field theory for the fractional excitations and examine the origin of the fractional excitations. Next we consider the relatives of the topological insulators. First we discuss the proximate symmetry broken phases of topological Mott insulator, a U(1) spin liquid with fermionic spinons in the topological insulator state. The topologically non-trivial band structure of the spinon generates the axion term for the gauge field, and we show that the axion term changes the nature of the confined phase of the spin liquid. Contrast to the conventional confined phase which has only a bond order, the confined phase of the spin liquid is in general a coexisting phase of the two different orders : a current order and a bond order. We then consider another relative of the topological insulator: a bosonic symmetry protected topological phase in two dimensional space, with both PSU(N) and time reversal symmetry. We develop an effective field theory for the phase, which is a SU(N) principal chiral model with a theta-term, and reveal the physics of the topological phase in detail.Finally we consider a topological semimetal, namely a Weyl semimetal. We first demonstrate that the Weyl semimetal can be realized in the magnetically doped topological band insulators. We explicitly derive the low energy theory of Weyl points from the general continuum Hamiltonian and tight-binding model of the topological insulators. Then we study superconducting instabilities of doped Weyl semimetals. We consider a minimal model for a Weyl semimetal and study the superconducting instabilities induced by a short-ranged attractive interaction. With the interaction, we find two competing states: a fully gapped finite-momentum pairing state and a nodal even-parity pairing state. We show that, in a mean field approximateion, the finite-momentum pairing state wins energetically against the usual even-parity paired state. We also show that exotic modes are localized at the full and half quantum vortices of the finite-momentum pairing state.
We construct an exactly soluble Hamiltonian on the D=3 cubic lattice, whose ground state is a topological phase of bosons protected by time-reversal symmetry, i.e., a symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phase. In this model, excitations with anyonic statistics are shown to exist at the surface but not in the bulk. The statistics of these surface anyons is explicitly computed and shown to be identical to the three-fermion Z2 model, a variant of Z2 topological order which cannot be realized in a purely D=2 system with time-reversal symmetry. Thus the model realizes a novel surface termination for three-dimensional (3D) SPT phases, that of a fully symmetric gapped surface with topological order. The 3D phase found here was previously proposed from a field theoretic analysis but is outside the group cohomology classification that appears to capture all SPT phases in lower dimensions. Such phases may potentially be realized in spin-orbit-coupled magnetic insulators, which evade magnetic ordering. Our construction utilizes the Walker-Wang prescription to create a 3D confined phase with surface anyons, which can be extended to other topological phases.