The concepts of deconfinement and topological order are of great current interest for quantum information science and for our understanding of quantum materials. Here, we introduce a simple model of three antiferromagnetically coupled Kondo impurities, a ``Kondo triangle'', which can be used to further extend the application of these concepts to electronic systems. We show that by tuning the magnetic frustration, the Kondo triangle undergoes a quantum phase transition between two phases of unbroken symmetry, signaling a phase transition beyond the Landau paradigm. We demonstrate that the frustrated ``spin liquid'' phase is described by a three-channel Kondo fixed point and thus displays an irrational ground state degeneracy. Using an Abrikosov pseudofermion representation this quantum state is categorized by an emergent U(1) gauge field and its projective symmetry group. The gauge theory is deconfining in the sense that a miniature Wilson loop orders and that topological defects (instantons in the gauge field) are expelled. This phase persists in presence of moderate Kondo screening until the proliferation of topological defects leads to a quantum phase transition to an unfrustrated Fermi liquid phase. Based on this evidence, we propose that the three-channel Kondo phase displays topological order in a similar sense as gapless spin liquids.
There has been significant recent interest in the potential exotic properties of multichannel Kondo lattices and their connection to quantum materials, but the strongly coupled nature of these models has posed challenges to theoretical investigations. We study the emergence of topological order in a two-dimensional two-channel Kondo lattice (2CKL) in a time-reversal symmetry-broken channel symmetric phase using a coupled-wire construction from one-dimensional (1D) 2CKLs. Through bosonization and symmetry analysis, we show that away from particle-hole symmetry, the 1D 2CKL model flows to an infrared fixed point with an emergent $\mathrm{SO}(3,1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}\mathrm{SU}(2)$ symmetry and a
Z2 gauge structure. Interwire couplings induce a transition to a topologically ordered metallic state characterized by fractionalized excitations and eightfold ground state degeneracy on a torus. Our findings connect impurity-based non-Fermi-liquid behavior to lattice topological order, with potential implications for quantum materials and topological quantum computation.
Topological phase transitions involving intrinsic topological orders are usually characterized by qualitative changes of ground state quantum entanglement, which cannot be described by conventional mean-field theories with local order parameters. Here, we apply the lattice Chern-Simons theory to study frustrated quantum magnets and show that the conventional concepts, such as the order parameter and symmetry breaking, can still play a crucial role in certain topological phase transitions. The lattice Chern-Simons representation establishes a nonlocal mapping from quantum spin models to interacting spinless Dirac fermions. We show that breaking certain emergent symmetries of the fermionic theory could provide a unified approach to describing both magnetic and topological orders, as well as the topological phase transitions between them. We apply this method to the perturbed spin-1/2 ${J}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{2}$ XY model on the honeycomb lattice and predict a nonuniform chiral spin liquid ground state in the strong frustration region. This is further verified by our high-precision tensor network calculations. These results suggest that the lattice Chern-Simons theory can simplify the complicated topological phase transitions to effective mean-field theories in terms of fermionic degrees of freedom, which lead to different understandings that help to understand the frustrated quantum magnets.
PACS. 74.20.-z – Theories and models of superconducting state. PACS. 11.15.Ha – Lattice gauge theory. PACS. 71.10.Hf – Non-Fermi-liquid ground states, electron phase diagrams and phase transitions in model systems. Abstract. – We study topological aspects of a compact lattice superconductor, and show that the characteristic energy splitting, ∆, between almost degenerate ground states, is simply related to a novel order parameter ˜ W, which is closely related to large Wilson loops. Using Monte Carlo methods, we study the scaling properties of ˜ W close to the deconfining phase transition, and conclude that ∆ ∼ e −L/ξ, where L is the size of the system, thus giving quantitative support to the vortex tunneling scenario proposed by Wen. The concept of topological order was first introduced to describe the ground states of the quantum Hall system [1]. Although the present interest in topological order to large extent derives from the quest for exotic non-Fermi liquid states of relevance for the high-Tc superconductors [2–6], the concept is of much more general interest. Both spin liquids [7,8], believed to be of relevance for frustrated magnets, and ordinary BCS superconductors with dynamical
We study a class of three-dimensional (3D) exactly solvable models of topological matter first put forward by Walker and Wang [Front. Phys. 7(2) 150 (2012)]. While these are not models of interacting fermions, they may well capture the topological behavior of some strongly correlated systems. In this work, we give a full pedagogical treatment of a special simple case of these models, which we call the 3D semion model: We calculate its ground-state degeneracies for a variety of boundary conditions, and classify its low-lying excitations. While point defects in the bulk are confined in pairs connected by energetic strings, the surface excitations are more interesting: the model has deconfined point defects pinned to the boundary of the lattice, and these exhibit semionic braiding statistics. The surface physics is reminiscent of a $\ensuremath{\nu}=\frac{1}{2}$ bosonic fractional quantum Hall effect in its topological limit, and these considerations help motivate an effective field theoretic description for the lattice models as variants of
bF theories. Our special example of the 3D semion model captures much of the behavior of more general ``confined Walker-Wang models.'' We contrast the 3D semion model with the closely related 3D version of the toric code (a lattice gauge theory) which has deconfined point excitations in the bulk, and we discuss how more general models may have some confined and some deconfined excitations. Having seen that there exist lattice models whose surfaces have the same topological order as a bosonic fractional quantum Hall effect on a confining bulk, we construct a lattice model whose surface has similar topological order to a fermionic quantum Hall effect. We find that in these models a fermion is always deconfined in the three-dimensional bulk.
We investigate, by means of a field-theory analysis combined with the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG) method, a theoretical model for a strongly correlated quantum system in one dimension realizing a topologically-ordered Haldane phase ground state. The model consists of a spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain coupled to a tight-binding chain via two competing Kondo exchange couplings of different type: a ``
s-wave'' Kondo coupling (
JKs), and a less common ``
p-wave'' (
JKp) Kondo coupling. While the first coupling is the standard Kondo interaction studied in many condensed-matter systems, the latter has been recently introduced by Alexandrov and Coleman [Phys. Rev. B 90, 115147 (2014)] as a possible mechanism leading to a topological Kondo-insulating ground state in one dimension. As a result of this competition, a topological quantum phase transition (TQPT) occurs in the system for a critical value of the ratio
JKs/JKp, separating a (Haldane-type) topological phase from a topologically trivial ground state where the system can be essentially described as a product of local singlets. We study and characterize the TQPT by means of the magnetization profile, the entanglement entropy and the full entanglement spectrum of the ground state. Our results might be relevant to understand how topologically-ordered phases of fermions emerge in strongly interacting quantum systems. Received: 1 July 2016, Accepted: 30 August 2016; Edited by: K. Hallberg; Reviewed by: D. C. Cabra, Instituto de Física La Plata, La Plata, Argentina; DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4279/PIP.080005Cite as: F T Lisandrini, A M Lobos, A O Dobry, C J Gazza, Papers in Physics 8, 080005 (2016)This paper, by F T Lisandrini, A M Lobos, A O Dobry, C J Gazza, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0.