Bulletin of the American Physical Society
Classification of interacting fermionic phases by dimensional reduction
Raquel Queiroz, Eslam Khalaf, Ady Stern
Abstract
We present a dimensional reduction argument to derive the classification of fermionic symmetry protected topological phases in the presence of interactions. The dimensional reduction proceeds by relating the topological character of a $d$-dimensional system to the number of zero-energy bound states localized at zero-dimensional topological defects present at its surface. This correspondence enables the construction of a symmetry preserving $n$-particle quartic interaction that renders the system topologically trivial. Our reduction shows that all phases with $\nu < n$ are topologically distinct, thereby reducing the non-interacting $\mathbb{Z}$ classification to $\mathbb{Z}_n$.