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arXiv:1610.07826 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Reduced density matrix and order parameters of a topological insulator

Wing Chi Yu, Yanchao Li, Pedro D Sacramento, Hai‐Qing Lin

Published Dec 16, 2016• 31 citations
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Abstract

It has been recently proposed that the reduced density matrix may be used to derive the order parameter of a condensed matter system. Here we propose order parameters for the phases of a topological insulator, specifically a spinless Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, and consider the effect of short-range interactions. All the derived order parameters and their possible corresponding quantum phases are verified by the entanglement entropy and electronic configuration analysis results. The order parameter appropriate to the topological regions is further proved by calculating the Berry phase under twisted boundary conditions. It is found that the topological nontrivial phase is robust to the introduction of repulsive intersite interactions and can appear in the topological trivial parameter region when appropriate interactions are added.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.94.245123

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arXiv:1406.7832•Journal of Statistical Mechanics Theory and Experiment•Oct 21, 2014•97 citations
It has been recently proposed that the reduced density matrix may be used to derive the order parameter of a condensed matter system. Here we propose order parameters for the phases of a topological insulator, specifically a spinless Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, and consider the effect of short-range interactions. All the derived order parameters and their possible corresponding quantum phases are verified by the entanglement entropy and electronic configuration analysis results. The order parameter appropriate to the topological regions is further proved by calculating the Berry phase under twisted boundary conditions. It is found that the topological nontrivial phase is robust to the introduction of repulsive intersite interactions and can appear in the topological trivial parameter region when appropriate interactions are added.
Topological insulators have attracted numerous attentions recent years, where the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model is one of the most studied models. While the interacting version of it has been explored recently, the interplay between interactions and long-range hoppings merit further investigations. In this work, we uncover a rich phase diagram of the interacting SSH model with extended-range hoppings, in which it consists of several topological phases, two novel superconducting-like (SC-like) phases and five distinct charge-density-wave (CDW) phases. We substantiate that the SC-like and two CDW phases are direct consequences of imbalanced interactions and extended-range hoppings. We derive the order parameters (OPs) for each of the phases and verify them in large-system simulations, finding consistency with the entanglement entropy and the fidelity in capturing the phase transitions. In contrast to the non-interacting case where the favored hoppings are unidirectional in the topological phases, the derived OPs suggest non-unidirectional hoppings are possible under the influence of interactions.
It was proposed recently by some of the authors that the quantum phase transition of a topological insulator like the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model may be detected by the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the reduced density matrix. Here we further extend the scheme of identifying the order parameters by considering the SSH model with the addition of triplet superconductivity. This model has a rich phase diagram due to the competition of the SSH ``order'' and the Kitaev ``order,'' which requires the introduction of four order parameters to describe the various topological phases. We show how these order parameters can be expressed simply as averages of projection operators on the ground state at certain points deep in each phase and how one can simply obtain the phase boundaries. A scaling analysis in the vicinity of the transition lines is consistent with the quantum Ising universality class.
Exploring topological phases in interacting systems is a challenging task. We investigate many-body topological physics of interacting fermions in an extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, which extends the two sublattices of the SSH model into four sublattices and thus is dubbed the SSH4 model, based on the density-matrix renormalization-group numerical method. The interaction-driven phase transition from the topological insulator phase to the charge density wave (CDW) phase can be identified by analyzing the variations of the entanglement spectrum, entanglement entropies, energy gaps, CDW order parameter, and fidelity. We map the global phase diagram of the many-body ground state, which contains nontrivial topological insulator, trivial insulator, and CDW phases, respectively. In contrast to the interacting SSH model, in which the phase transitions to the CDW phase are argued to be first-order phase transitions, the phase transitions between the CDW phase and topologically trivial or nontrivial phases are shown to be continuous phase transitions. Finally, we also show the phase diagram of the interacting spinful SSH4 model, where the attractive (repulsive) on-site spin interaction amplifies (suppresses) the CDW phase. The models analyzed here can be implemented with ultracold atoms on optical superlattices.
The topological properties of the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model in the presence of nearest-neighbor interaction are investigated by means of a topological marker, generalized from a noninteracting one by utilizing the single-particle Green's function of the many-body ground state. We find that despite the marker not being perfectly quantized in the presence of interactions, it always remains finite in the topologically nontrivial phase while converging to zero in the trivial phase when approaching the thermodynamic limit, and hence correctly judges the topological phases in the presence of interactions. The marker also correctly captures the interaction-driven, second-order phase transitions between a topological phase and a Landau-ordered phase, which is a charge-density wave order in our model with a local-order parameter, as confirmed by the calculation of entanglement entropy and the many-body Zak phase. Our paper thus points to the possibility of generalizing topological markers to interacting systems through Green's function, which may be feasible for topological insulators in any dimension and symmetry class.
Topological phases at quantum criticality have attracted much attention recently. Here we numerically study the interaction-induced phase transitions at around the topological quantum critical points of an extended Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) chain with next-nearest-neighbor hopping. This extended SSH model shows topological phase transitions between the topologically trivial and nontrivial critical phases when interaction is absent. So long as the interaction terms are turned on, the topologically nontrivial (trivial) critical phases are driven into topologically nontrivial (trivial) insulator phases with finite energy gaps. Particularly, we find the trivial insulator phase is further driven to the nontrivial insulator phase, through interaction-induced topological phase transition, although interaction generally is harmful to nontrivial topology. The stability of the trivial insulator phase against interaction tends to vanish at the multicritical point that separates the trivial and nontrivial critical phases. Our work provides a concrete example for manifesting the impact of interaction on topological quantum criticality.
We present a detailed study of the fidelity, the entanglement entropy, and the entanglement spectrum, for a dimerized chain of spinless fermions---a simplified Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model---with open boundary conditions which is a well-known example for a model supporting a symmetry protected topological (SPT) phase. In the non-interacting case the Hamiltonian matrix is tridiagonal and the eigenvalues and -vectors can be given explicitly as a function of a single parameter which is known analytically for odd chain lengths and can be determined numerically in the even length case. From a scaling analysis of these data for essentially semi-infinite chains we obtain the fidelity susceptibility and show that it contains a boundary contribution which is different in the topologically ordered than in the topologically trivial phase. For the entanglement spectrum and entropy we confirm predictions from massive field theory for a block in the middle of an infinite chain but also consider blocks containing the edge of the chain. For the latter case we show that in the SPT phase additional entanglement---as compared to the trivial phase---is present which is localized at the boundary. Finally, we extend our study to the dimerized chain with a nearest-neighbour interaction using exact diagonalization, Arnoldi, and density-matrix renormalization group methods and show that a phase transition into a topologically trivial charge-density wave phase occurs.