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arXiv:1304.2099 · Physical Review B

Z2 fractionalized Chern/topological insulators in an exactly soluble correlated model

Yin Zhong, Yufeng Wang, Hong‐Gang Luo

Published Jul 8, 2013• 16 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

In this paper we propose an exactly soluble model in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice, from which two phases are found. One is the usual Chern/topological insulating state and the other is an interesting ${Z}_{2}$ fractionalized Chern/topological insulator. While their bulk properties are similar, the edge states of physical electrons are quite different. The single electron excitation of the former shows a free particle like behavior while the latter one is gapped, which provides a definite signature to identify the fractionalized states. The transition between these two phases is found to fall into the three-dimensional Ising universal class. Significantly, near the quantum transition point the physical electron in the edge states shows strong Luttinger liquid behavior. An extension to the interesting case of the square lattice is also made. In addition, we also discuss some relationship between our exactly soluble model and various Hubbard-like models existing in the literature. The essential difference between the proposed ${Z}_{2}$ fractionalized Chern insulator and the hotly pursued fractional Chern insulator is also pointed out. The present work may be helpful for further study on the fractionalized insulating phase and related novel correlated quantum phases.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.88.045109

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In this paper we propose an exactly soluble model in a two-dimensional honeycomb lattice, from which two phases are found. One is the usual Chern/topological insulating state and the other is an interesting Z2{Z}_{2}Z2​ fractionalized Chern/topological insulator. While their bulk properties are similar, the edge states of physical electrons are quite different. The single electron excitation of the former shows a free particle like behavior while the latter one is gapped, which provides a definite signature to identify the fractionalized states. The transition between these two phases is found to fall into the three-dimensional Ising universal class. Significantly, near the quantum transition point the physical electron in the edge states shows strong Luttinger liquid behavior. An extension to the interesting case of the square lattice is also made. In addition, we also discuss some relationship between our exactly soluble model and various Hubbard-like models existing in the literature. The essential difference between the proposed Z2{Z}_{2}Z2​ fractionalized Chern insulator and the hotly pursued fractional Chern insulator is also pointed out. The present work may be helpful for further study on the fractionalized insulating phase and related novel correlated quantum phases.
We construct exactly soluble lattice models for fractionalized, time-reversal-invariant electronic insulators in two and three dimensions. The low-energy physics of these models is exactly equivalent to a noninteracting topological insulator built out of fractionally charged fermionic quasiparticles. We show that some of our models have protected edge modes [in two dimensions (2D)] and surface modes (in 3D), and are thus fractionalized analogs of topological insulators. We also find that some of the 2D models do not have protected edge modes; that is, the edge modes can be gapped out by appropriate time-reversal-invariant, charge-conserving perturbations. (A similar state of affairs may also exist in 3D.) We show that all of our models are topologically ordered, exhibiting fractional statistics as well as ground-state degeneracy on a torus. In the 3D case, we find that the models exhibit a fractional magnetoelectric effect.
Recent theoretical papers have demonstrated the realization of fractional quantum anomalous Hall states (also called fractional Chern insulators) in topological flat band lattice models without an external magnetic field. Such newly proposed lattice systems play a vital role in obtaining a large class of fractional topological phases. Here we report the exact numerical studies of edge excitations for such systems in a disk geometry loaded with hard-core bosons, which will serve as a more viable experimental probe for such topologically ordered states. We find convincing numerical evidence of a series of edge excitations characterized by the chiral Luttinger liquid theory for the bosonic fractional Chern insulators in both the honeycomb disk Haldane model and the kagome-lattice disk model. We further verify these current-carrying chiral edge states by inserting a central flux to test their compressibility.
The interplay among symmetry, topology and condensed matter systems has deepened our understandings of matter and lead to tremendous recent progresses in finding new topological phases of matter such as topological insulators, superconductors and semi-metals. Most examples of the aforementioned topological materials are free fermion systems, in this thesis, however, we focus on their strongly correlated counterparts where electron-electron interactions play a major role. With interactions, exotic topological phases and quantum critical points with fractionalized quantum degrees of freedom emerge. In the first part of this thesis, we study the problem of resonant tunneling through a quantum dot in a spinful Luttinger liquid. It provides the simplest example of a (0+1)d system with symmetry-protected phase transitions. We show that the problem is equivalent to a two channel SU(3) Kondo problem and can be mapped to a quantum Brownian motion model on a Kagome lattice. Utilizing boundary conformal field theory, we find the universal peak conductance and compute the scaling behavior of the resonance line-shape.\nFor the second part, we present a model of interacting Majorana fermions that describes a superconducting phase with a topological order characterized by the Fibonacci topological field theory. Our theory is based on a SO(7)1=SO(7)1/(G2)1 x (G2)1 coset construction and implemented by a solvable two-dimensional network model. In addition, we predict a closely related ''anti-Fibonacci'' phase, whose topological order is characterized by the tricritical Ising model. Finally, we propose an interferometer that generalizes the Z2 Majorana interferometer and directly probes the Fibonacci non-Abelian statistics.\nFor the third part, we argue that a correlated fluid of electrons and holes can exhibit fractional quantum Hall effects at zero magnetic field. We first show that a Chern insulator can be realized as a free fermion model with p-wave(m=1) excitonic pairing. Its ground state wavefunction is then worked out and generalized to m>1. We give several pieces of evidence that this conjectured wavefunction correctly describes a topological phase, dubbed ''fractional excitonic insulator'', within the same universality class as the corresponding Laughlin state at filling 1/m. We present physical arguments that gapless states with higher angular momentum pairing between energy bands are conducive to forming the fractional excitonic insulator in the presence of repulsive interactions. Without interactions, these gapless states appear at topological phase transitions which separate the trivial insulator from a Chern insulator with higher Chern number. Since the nonvanishing density of states at these higher angular momentum band inversion transitions can give rise to interesting many-body effects, we introduce a series of minimal lattice models realizations in two dimensions. We also study the effect of rotational symmetry broken electron-hole exciton condensation in our lattice models using mean field theory.
Edge states of chiral topologically ordered phases are commonly described by chiral Luttinger liquids, effective theories that are exact only in the hydrodynamic limit. Motivated by recent bulk observations of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) in two-dimensional materials and by synthetic realizations in ultracold atoms, we revisit this framework and quantify deviations from the hydrodynamic limit due to lattice effects. Using a combination of analytical arguments and numerical simulations, we disentangle universal from nonuniversal edge properties. We outline experimental probes in excitonic FCIs and in ultracold atom systems, and in particular propose time-resolved edge spectroscopy to directly access the predicted exponents and velocities.
Following an earlier construction of exactly soluble lattice models for Abelian fractional topological insulators in two and three dimensions, we construct here an exactly soluble lattice model for a non-Abelian $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ quantum Hall state and a non-Abelian topological insulator in two dimensions. We show that both models are topologically ordered, exhibiting fractionalized charge, ground-state degeneracy on the torus, and protected edge modes. The models feature non-Abelian vortices which carry fractional electric charge in the quantum Hall case and spin in the topological insulator case. We analyze the statistical properties of the excitations in detail and discuss the possibility of extending this construction to three-dimensional non-Abelian topological insulators.
In the past few years, the discovery of topological insulators has resurrected the study of exotic phases of matter beyond the Landau symmetry breaking paradigm. In this thesis, we focus on two particular classes of exotic phases, known as "topological phases" and "symmetry protected topological phases (SPT phases)" in 2D and 3D. Topological phases are generalizations of fractional quantum Hall liquids while SPT phases are generalizations of topological insulators. We investigate topological phases and SPT phases by constructing and analyzing appropriate exactly soluble lattice spin models. We address the following three questions: The first question involves a large class of exactly soluble lattice spin models called string-net models. It is known that string-net models can realize a large class of 2D topological phases, but it is unclear what topological phases can and can not be realized by these models. Thus our first question is: what are the most general topological phases that can be realized by string-net models? We find that a topological phase can be realized by a string-net model if and only if it supports a gapped edge, i.e. the edge can be gapped by suitable local interactions. In the second question we ask: how can we distinguish different 3D topological phases? While it is well known that 3D topological phases can be distinguished by the braiding statistics between particle and loop-like excitations, we construct two exactly soluble lattice models that demonstrate that we also have to consider the braiding statistics of loops with other loops. In the final part of the thesis, we derive a bulk-boundary correspondence for 3D SPT phases. More specifically, we prove that a particular exactly soluble lattice spin model has protected surface states using the fact that the vortex loop excitations in the bulk have non-trivial braiding statistics. We prove the result for a particular 3D exactly soluble lattice model, but our arguments apply more generally.