A scheme is proposed to construct integer and fractional topological quantum states of fermions in two spatial dimensions. We devise models for such states by coupling wires of non-chiral Luttinger liquids of electrons, that are arranged in a periodic array. Which inter-wire couplings are allowed is dictated by symmetry and the compatibility criterion that they can simultaneously acquire a finite expectation value, opening a spectral gap between the ground state(s) and all excited states in the bulk. First, with these criteria at hand, we reproduce the tenfold classification table of integer topological insulators, where their stability against interactions becomes immediately transparent in the Luttinger liquid description. Second, we construct an example of a strongly interacting fermionic topological phase of matter with short-range entanglement that lies outside of the tenfold classification. Third, we expand the table to long-range entangled topological phases with intrinsic topological order and fractional excitations.
A scheme is proposed to construct integer and fractional topological quantum states of fermions in two spatial dimensions. We devise models for such states by coupling wires of non-chiral Luttinger liquids of electrons, that are arranged in a periodic array. Which inter-wire couplings are allowed is dictated by symmetry and the compatibility criterion that they can simultaneously acquire a finite expectation value, opening a spectral gap between the ground state(s) and all excited states in the bulk. First, with these criteria at hand, we reproduce the tenfold classification table of integer topological insulators, where their stability against interactions becomes immediately transparent in the Luttinger liquid description. Second, we construct an example of a strongly interacting fermionic topological phase of matter with short-range entanglement that lies outside of the tenfold classification. Third, we expand the table to long-range entangled topological phases with intrinsic topological order and fractional excitations.
A scheme is proposed to construct integer and fractional topological quantum states of fermions in two spatial dimensions. We devise models for such states by coupling wires of non-chiral Luttinger liquids of electrons, that are arranged in a periodic array. Which inter-wire couplings are allowed is dictated by symmetry and the compatibility criterion that they can simultaneously acquire a finite expectation value, opening a spectral gap between the ground state(s) and all excited states in the bulk. First, with these criteria at hand, we reproduce the tenfold classification table of integer topological insulators, where their stability against interactions becomes immediately transparent in the Luttinger liquid description. Second, we construct an example of a strongly interacting fermionic topological phase of matter with short-range entanglement that lies outside of the tenfold classification. Third, we expand the table to long-range entangled topological phases with intrinsic topological order and fractional excitations.
The classification of phases of matter according to topological properties is a central topic of current condensed matter research. In this work, the authors prove the validity of an existing classification of phases of noninteracting fermion systems in the presence of strong interactions. To that end, they employ an intuitive construction based on strongly coupled quantum wires. All these phases of matter have electron-like, non-fractionalized excitations. Within the same framework, the authors further show that every phase in this classification has a strongly interacting cousin with fractionalized excitations - a so-called intrinsically topologically order phase.
We study topological phases of interacting systems in two spatial dimensions in the absence of topological order (i.e., with a unique ground state on closed manifolds and no fractional excitations). These are the closest interacting analogs of integer quantum Hall states, topological insulators, and superconductors. We adapt the well-known Chern-Simons K-matrix description of quantum Hall states to classify such ``integer'' topological phases. Our main result is a general formalism that incorporates symmetries into the K-matrix description. Remarkably, this simple analysis yields the same list of topological phases as a recent group cohomology classification, and in addition provides field theories and explicit edge theories for all these phases. The bosonic topological phases, which only appear in the presence of interactions and which remain well defined in the presence of disorder, include (i) bosonic insulators with a Hall conductance quantized to even integers, (ii) a bosonic analog of quantum spin Hall insulators, and (iii) a bosonic analog of a chiral topological superconductor, whose K matrix is the Cartan matrix of Lie group E8. We also discuss interacting fermion systems where symmetries are realized in a projective fashion, where we find the present formalism can handle a wider range of symmetries than a recent group super-cohomology classification. Lastly, we construct microscopic models of these phases from coupled one-dimensional systems.
Insulating Z2 spin liquids are a phase of matter with bulk anyonic quasiparticle excitations and ground-state degeneracies on manifolds with nontrivial topology. We construct a time-reversal symmetric Z2 spin liquid in two spatial dimensions using an array of quantum wires. We identify the anyons as kinks in the appropriate Luttinger-liquid description, compute their mutual statistics, and construct local operators that transport these quasiparticles. We also present a construction of a fractionalized Fermi liquid (FL*) by coupling the spin sector of the Z2 spin liquid to a Fermi liquid via a Kondo-like coupling.
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 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 Read-Rezayi sequence of fractional quantum Hall states. Focusing in detail on the 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 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.
Topological phases of matter are purely quantum mechanical and have no classical analogue. Most phases in nature can be classified and studied classically through the concept of symmetry breaking and its theoretical description, Landau-Ginzburg field theory. In contrast to the general wisdom of Landau-Ginzburg field theory, the topological phases share the same symmetry as a trivial insulator and still are different phases. Having gapped spectrum in bulk, they support a metallic edge excition robust against symmetry-respecting perturbation or an emergent fractional excitation in bulk. Following after fractional quantum Hall fluids, many topologically orderd phases, such as spin liquids and topological insulators, have been found and studied. Spin liquids are disordered phases of frustrated antiferromagnets and do not freeze and order even at the lowest temperature. They support an electrically neutral spin-1/2 excitation, which does not exist in a microscopic scale, with emergent dynamical gauge field in bulk and do not have an adiabatic path to a trivial paramagnet phase. The topological insulators are time-reversal symmetric band insulators which cannot evolve smoothly into a trivial insulator with the symmetry, and they have been intensely studied theoretically and experimetally for the last decade. Though the topological insulators are inherently non-interacting systems, they have exotic gapless edge and surface states which demonstrate many interesting quantum phenomena such as fractionalization, axionic electromagnetism, and half quantum Hall effect. In this thesis, we study various quantum phenomena of the topological phases, mainly of the topological insulator and its close relatives in which the physics of spin liquids has been merged into. As they are intrinsically quantum many-body states, the quantum field theory is an invaluable tool to explore the venue of the phases and will be used thorougly in this work. First, we present a topological field theoretic description of the topological insulators and translational symmetric Z2 spin liquid. We demostrate that abelian BF theory is an effective field theory for the two and three dimensional topological insulators. We show that the phenomenologies of BF theory are consistent with those of the topological insulators such as gapless edge and surface excitations and response functions to external gauge field. The same form of the BF theory is also applicable to study the certain classes of Z2 spin liquids with the gapless edge states. We closely examine the possible gapless edge theory of the BF theory and the translational symmetric spin liquids, and we show that the effective BF theories capture the bulk properties as well as the gapless edge spectrum of the spin liquid. Also we discuss the zero-temperature phase diagram of a thin film three dimensional topological insulators with two competing mass terms: time-reversal symmetric exciton condensation and time-reversal symmetry breaking Zeeman effect. There are two phases, quantum spin Hall phase and quantum anomalous Hall phase, and both phases support fractional excitations. We derive an effective topological field theory for the fractional excitations and examine the origin of the fractional excitations. Next we consider the relatives of the topological insulators. First we discuss the proximate symmetry broken phases of topological Mott insulator, a U(1) spin liquid with fermionic spinons in the topological insulator state. The topologically non-trivial band structure of the spinon generates the axion term for the gauge field, and we show that the axion term changes the nature of the confined phase of the spin liquid. Contrast to the conventional confined phase which has only a bond order, the confined phase of the spin liquid is in general a coexisting phase of the two different orders : a current order and a bond order. We then consider another relative of the topological insulator: a bosonic symmetry protected topological phase in two dimensional space, with both PSU(N) and time reversal symmetry. We develop an effective field theory for the phase, which is a SU(N) principal chiral model with a theta-term, and reveal the physics of the topological phase in detail.Finally we consider a topological semimetal, namely a Weyl semimetal. We first demonstrate that the Weyl semimetal can be realized in the magnetically doped topological band insulators. We explicitly derive the low energy theory of Weyl points from the general continuum Hamiltonian and tight-binding model of the topological insulators. Then we study superconducting instabilities of doped Weyl semimetals. We consider a minimal model for a Weyl semimetal and study the superconducting instabilities induced by a short-ranged attractive interaction. With the interaction, we find two competing states: a fully gapped finite-momentum pairing state and a nodal even-parity pairing state. We show that, in a mean field approximateion, the finite-momentum pairing state wins energetically against the usual even-parity paired state. We also show that exotic modes are localized at the full and half quantum vortices of the finite-momentum pairing state.