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arXiv:1711.03090 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Bulk characterization of topological crystalline insulators: Stability under interactions and relations to symmetry enriched U (1) quantum spin liquids

Liujun Zou

Published Jan 16, 2018• 33 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The notion of symmetry protected distinctions among quantum phases has been well appreciated in understanding many-body systems. As a prominent example, recent studies on topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) indicate that these insulators are nontrivial if and only if the relevant crystalline (and some other) symmetries are preserved. By bulk-boundary correspondence, the authors study the properties of the bulk magnetic monopoles of some TCIs that are conceptually interesting and/or experimentally feasible, and argue that this bulk characterization is a more direct and unified physical description of a TCI. In doing so, the authors prove the stability of these TCIs with respect to interactions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.97.045130

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Bulk characterization of topological crystalline insulators: Stability under interactions and relations to symmetry enriched

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The notion of symmetry protected distinctions among quantum phases has been well appreciated in understanding many-body systems. As a prominent example, recent studies on topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) indicate that these insulators are nontrivial if and only if the relevant crystalline (and some other) symmetries are preserved. By bulk-boundary correspondence, the authors study the properties of the bulk magnetic monopoles of some TCIs that are conceptually interesting and/or experimentally feasible, and argue that this bulk characterization is a more direct and unified physical description of a TCI. In doing so, the authors prove the stability of these TCIs with respect to interactions.
Topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) are nontrivial quantum phases of matter protected by crystalline (and other) symmetries. They are originally predicted by band theories, so an important question is their stability under interactions. In this paper, by directly studying the physical bulk properties of several band-theory-based nontrivial TCIs that are conceptually interesting and/or experimentally feasible, we show they are stable under interactions. These TCIs include (1) a weak topological insulator, (2) a TCI with a mirror symmetry and its time-reversal symmetric generalizations, (3) a doubled topological insulator with a mirror symmetry, and (4) two TCIs with symmetry-enforced-gapless surfaces. We describe two complementary methods that allow us to determine the properties of the magnetic monopoles obtained by coupling these TCIs to a U(1) gauge field. These methods involve studying different types of surface states of these TCIs. Applying these methods to our examples, we find all of them have nontrivial monopoles, which proves their stability under interactions. Furthermore, we discuss two levels of relations between these TCIs and symmetry enriched U(1) quantum spin liquids (QSLs). First, these TCIs are directly related to U(1) QSLs with crystalline symmetries. Second, there is an interesting correspondence between U(1) QSLs with crystalline symmetries and U(1) QSLs with internal symmetries. In particular, the TCIs with symmetry-enforced-gapless surfaces are related to the “fractional topological paramagnets” introduced in Zou et al. [arXiv:1710.00743].
Motivated by recent progress in crystalline symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases of interacting bosons, we study topological crystalline insulators/superconductors (TCIs) of strongly interacting fermions. We construct a class of intrinsically interacting fermionic TCIs, and show that they are beyond both free-fermion TCIs and bosonic crystalline SPT phases. We also show how these phases can be characterized by symmetry protected gapless fermion modes on the corners/hinges of an open system.
The imposition of crystalline symmetries is known to lead to a rich variety of insulating and superconducting topological phases. These include higher-order topological phases and obstructed atomic limits with and without filling anomalies. We here comprehensively classify such topological crystalline phases (TCPs) with mirror, twofold rotation, and inversion symmetries in the presence of disorder that preserves the crystalline symmetry on average. We find that the inclusion of disorder leads to a simplification of the classification in comparison to the clean case. We also find that, while clean TCPs evade a general bulk-boundary principle, disordered TCPs admit a complete bulk-boundary correspondence, according to which (bulk) topological phases are topologically equivalent if and only if they have the same anomalous boundary states and filling anomaly. We corroborate the stability of disordered TCPs by way of field-theoretic, numerical, and symmetry-based analyses in various case studies. While the boundary signatures of most disordered TCPs are similar to their clean counterparts, the addition of disorder to certain mirror-symmetric TCPs results in novel higher-order statistical topological phases, in which zero-energy hinge states have critical wave-function statistics, while remaining protected from Anderson localization.
We study the effect of electron interactions in topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) protected by mirror symmetry, which are realized in the SnTe material class and host multivalley Dirac fermion surface states. We find that interactions reduce the integer classification of noninteracting TCIs in three dimensions, indexed by the mirror Chern number, to a finite group Z8{Z}_{8}Z8​. In particular, we explicitly construct a microscopic interaction Hamiltonian to gap eight flavors of Dirac fermions on the TCI surface, while preserving the mirror symmetry. Our construction builds on interacting edge states of $U(1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{Z}_{2}$ symmetry-protected topological phases of fermions in two dimensions, which we classify. Our work reveals a deep connection between three-dimensional topological phases protected by spatial symmetries and two-dimensional topological phases protected by internal symmetries.
Crystalline symmetries give rise to topological invariants that can distinguish quantum phases of matter. Understanding these in strongly interacting systems is an ongoing research direction requiring non-perturbative methods. Recent developments have demonstrated that even classic models, like the Harper-Hofstadter model of free fermions on a lattice in a magnetic field, yield a host of crystalline symmetry protected topological invariants. Here we review some of these developments, focusing mainly on how to characterize, classify, and detect invariants arising from lattice translation and rotation symmetries along with charge conservation in two-dimensional systems, including integer and fractional Chern insulators.
The natural existence of crystalline symmetry in real materials manifests the importance of understanding crystalline symmetry-protected topological phases, especially for interacting systems. In this paper, we systematically construct and classify all the point-group crystalline topological superconductors and insulators in three-dimensional (3D) interacting fermion systems using the novel concept of a topological crystal. The corresponding higher-order topological surface theory can also be systematically studied via higher-order bulk-boundary correspondence. In particular, we discover several intrinsically interacting topological phases that cannot be realized in any free-fermion systems. Moreover, the crystalline equivalence principle for 3D interacting fermionic systems is also verified, with an additional subtle “twist” on the spin of fermions.