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arXiv:1711.05746 · Physical Review X

From Dirac Semimetals to Topological Phases in Three Dimensions: A Coupled-Wire Construction

Syed Raza, Alexander Sirota, Jeffrey C. Y. Teo

Published Feb 27, 2019• 24 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Weyl and Dirac (semi)metals in three dimensions have robust gapless electronic band structures.Their massless single-body energy spectra are protected by symmetries such as lattice translation, (screw) rotation, and time reversal.In this paper, we discuss many-body interactions in these systems.We focus on strong interactions that preserve symmetries and are outside the single-body mean-field regime.By mapping a Dirac (semi)metal to a model based on a three-dimensional array of coupled Dirac wires, we show (1) the Dirac (semi)metal can acquire a many-body excitation energy gap without breaking the relevant symmetries, and (2) interaction can enable an anomalous Weyl (semi)metallic phase that is otherwise forbidden by symmetries in the single-body setting and can only be present holographically on the boundary of a four-dimensional weak topological insulator.Both of these topological states support fractional gapped (gapless) bulk (respectively, boundary) quasiparticle excitations.

DOI
10.1103/physrevx.9.011039

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Weyl and Dirac (semi)metals in three dimensions have robust gapless electronic band structures.Their massless single-body energy spectra are protected by symmetries such as lattice translation, (screw) rotation, and time reversal.In this paper, we discuss many-body interactions in these systems.We focus on strong interactions that preserve symmetries and are outside the single-body mean-field regime.By mapping a Dirac (semi)metal to a model based on a three-dimensional array of coupled Dirac wires, we show (1) the Dirac (semi)metal can acquire a many-body excitation energy gap without breaking the relevant symmetries, and (2) interaction can enable an anomalous Weyl (semi)metallic phase that is otherwise forbidden by symmetries in the single-body setting and can only be present holographically on the boundary of a four-dimensional weak topological insulator.Both of these topological states support fractional gapped (gapless) bulk (respectively, boundary) quasiparticle excitations.
Topological nodal superconductors possess gapless low energy excitations that are characterized by point or line nodal Fermi surfaces. In this work, using a coupled wire construction, we study topological nodal superconductors that have protected Dirac nodal points. In this construction, the low-energy electronic degrees of freedom are confined in a three-dimensional array of wires, which emerge as pairing vortices of a microscopic superconducting system. The vortex array harbors an antiferromagnetic time-reversal and a mirror glide symmetry that protect the massless Dirac fermion in the single-body noninteracting limit. Within this model, we demonstrate exact-solvable many-body interactions that preserve the underlying symmetries and introduce a finite excitation energy gap. These gapping interactions support fractionalization and generically lead to nontrivial topological order. We also construct a special case of N=16N=16N=16 Dirac fermions where the corresponding gapping interaction leads to a trivial E8{E}_{8}E8​ topological order that is closely related to the cancellation of the large gravitational anomaly.
It has recently been demonstrated that it is possible to open a gap in a magnetic Weyl semimetal, while preserving the chiral anomaly along with the charge conservation and translational symmetries, which all protect the gapless nodes in a weakly interacting semimetal. The resulting state was shown to be a nontrivial generalization of a non-Abelian fractional quantum Hall liquid to three dimensions. Here we point out that a second fractional quantum Hall state exists in this case. This state has exactly the same electrical and thermal Hall responses as the first, but a distinct (fracton) topological order. Moreover, the existence of this second fractional quantum Hall state necessarily implies a gapless phase, which has identical topological response to a noninteracting Weyl semimetal, but is distinct from it. This may be viewed as a generalization (in a weaker form) of the known duality between a noninteracting two-dimensional Dirac fermion and QED3{\mathrm{QED}}_{3}QED3​ to 3+13+13+1 dimensions. In addition we discuss a (3+1)(3+1)(3+1)-dimensional topologically ordered state, obtained by gapping a nodal line semimetal without breaking symmetries.
Starting from an array of interacting fermionic quantum wires, we construct a family of non-Abelian topologically ordered states of matter in three spatial dimensions (3D). These states of matter inherit their non-Abelian topological properties from the su(2)k su(2)^{\,}_{k}su(2)k​ conformal field theories that characterize the constituent interacting quantum wires in the decoupled limit. Thus, the resulting topological phases can be viewed as 3D generalizations of the (bosonic) su(2)k su(2)^{\,}_{k}su(2)k​ Read-Rezayi sequence of fractional quantum Hall states. Focusing in detail on the su(2)2 su(2)^{\,}_{2}su(2)2​ case, we first review how to determine the nature of the non-Abelian topological order (in particular, the topological degeneracy on the torus) in the two-dimensional (2D) case, before generalizing this approach to the 3D case. We also investigate the 2D boundary of the 3D phases, and show for the su(2)2 su(2)^{\,}_{2}su(2)2​ case that there are anomalous gapless surface states protected by an analog of time-reversal symmetry, similar to the massless Dirac surface states of the noninteracting 3D topological insulator.
We introduce (3+1)(3+1)(3+1)-dimensional models of short-range-interacting electrons that form a strongly correlated many-body state whose low-energy excitations are relativistic neutral fermions coupled to an emergent gauge field, QED4{\text{QED}}_{4}QED4​. We discuss the properties of this critical state and its instabilities towards exotic phases such as a gapless ``composite'' Weyl semimetal and fully gapped topologically ordered phases that feature anyonic pointlike as well as linelike excitations. These fractionalized phases describe electronic insulators. They may be further enriched by symmetries which result in the formation of nontrivial surface states.
Weyl semimetals are three-dimensional, topologically protected, gapless phases which show exotic phenomena such as Fermi arc surface states or negative magnetoresistance. It is an open question whether interparticle interactions can turn the topological semimetal into a topologically nontrivial Mott-insulating phase. We investigate an experimentally motivated model for Weyl physics of cold atoms in optical lattices, with the main focus on interaction effects and topological properties, by means of dynamical mean-field theory. We characterize topological phases by numerically evaluating the Chern number via the Ishikawa-Matsuyama formula for interacting phases. Within our studies, we find that the Chern numbers become trivial when interactions lead to insulating behavior. For a deeper understanding of the Weyl-semimetal-to-Mott-insulator topological phase transition, we evaluate the topological properties of quasiparticle bands as well as so-called blind bands. Finally, we consider a system with an open boundary along one spatial direction in order to study correlation effects of surface states. In a narrow regime close to the topological phase transition, we find a correlation-induced state in which the surface becomes metallic while the bulk is semimetallic.
Recently, there has been much effort in understanding topological phases of matter with gapless bulk excitations, which are characterized by topological invariants and protected intrinsic boundary states. Here we show that topological semimetals of Majorana fermions arise in exactly solvable Kitaev spin models on a series of three-dimensional lattices. The ground states of these models are quantum spin liquids with gapless nodal spectra of bulk Majorana fermion excitations. It is shown that these phases are topologically stable as long as certain discrete symmetries are protected. The corresponding topological indices and the gapless boundary states are explicitly computed to support these results. In contrast to previous studies of noninteracting systems, the phases discussed in this work are novel examples of gapless topological phases in interacting spin systems.