The recent discovery of topological insulators has led to a tremendous interest in the exploration of topological phases of matter which do not fit into Landau's symmetry breaking paradigm. Numerous exotic topological materials are theoretically predicted. Some of them have been experimentally reported, but many remain not. In this thesis, we explore topological phases of matter from three aspects: their classification, realization and application. We first review some basic classification theories, which provide us a "big picture" and lay the foundation for the rest of the thesis. We then move on to propose a systematic method based on quaternion algebra to construct toy tight-binding Hamiltonians for all the exotic phases in a recently developed periodic table for topological insulators and superconductors. We also introduce two peculiar families of topological phases that are beyond the table---the Hopf and four-dimensional topological insulators without time reversal symmetry. Prototypical Hamiltonians are constructed and their topological properties, such as robust edge states, are numerically studied. Motivated by rapid experimental progress in engineering spin-orbit coupling and artificial gauge field for cold atoms, we continue the thesis by proposing a feasible experimental scheme to realize a three-dimensional chiral topological insulator with cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. To unambiguously probe topological phases, we also bring forth systematic and generic methods to measure the characteristic topological invariants, for both free and strongly interacting systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that a kaleidoscope of knot and link structures is encoded in the spin texture of Hopf insulators and show how to observe different knots and links in cold atoms via time-of-flight images. The last part of the thesis is about the application of topological materials. After a demonstration of how to create, braid and detect Majorana fermions with cold atoms, we put forward a proposal to construct a self-test quantum random number generator by using Majorana fermions. Majorana random number generators are able to generate certifiable true random numbers with unconditional security. They offer a new perspective to the utilization of topological materials and may have vital applications in cryptography and related areas.
The recent discovery of topological insulators has led to a tremendous interest in the exploration of topological phases of matter which do not fit into Landau's symmetry breaking paradigm. Numerous exotic topological materials are theoretically predicted. Some of them have been experimentally reported, but many remain not. In this thesis, we explore topological phases of matter from three aspects: their classification, realization and application. We first review some basic classification theories, which provide us a "big picture" and lay the foundation for the rest of the thesis. We then move on to propose a systematic method based on quaternion algebra to construct toy tight-binding Hamiltonians for all the exotic phases in a recently developed periodic table for topological insulators and superconductors. We also introduce two peculiar families of topological phases that are beyond the table---the Hopf and four-dimensional topological insulators without time reversal symmetry. Prototypical Hamiltonians are constructed and their topological properties, such as robust edge states, are numerically studied. Motivated by rapid experimental progress in engineering spin-orbit coupling and artificial gauge field for cold atoms, we continue the thesis by proposing a feasible experimental scheme to realize a three-dimensional chiral topological insulator with cold fermionic atoms in an optical lattice. To unambiguously probe topological phases, we also bring forth systematic and generic methods to measure the characteristic topological invariants, for both free and strongly interacting systems. Moreover, we demonstrate that a kaleidoscope of knot and link structures is encoded in the spin texture of Hopf insulators and show how to observe different knots and links in cold atoms via time-of-flight images. The last part of the thesis is about the application of topological materials. After a demonstration of how to create, braid and detect Majorana fermions with cold atoms, we put forward a proposal to construct a self-test quantum random number generator by using Majorana fermions. Majorana random number generators are able to generate certifiable true random numbers with unconditional security. They offer a new perspective to the utilization of topological materials and may have vital applications in cryptography and related areas.
This thesis is a contribution to the research field of quantum simulations of topological phases of matter, i.e. quantum states characterized by a non-local order parameter.The aim of the research on quantum simulations is to overcome the difficulties encountered in the study of quantum mechanical models with conventional numerical methods.The proposed way to accomplish this task is the direct exploitation of controllable quantum systems whose properties, for instance low-energy physics, mimic those of the model to be studied.We study several problems connected to the objective of creating a quantum simulator of topological phases of matter.In particular, we discuss how to engineer the Hamiltonian of topological models, how to measure quantities which unravel topological orders, and how to quantify the reliability of topological quantum memories.The first direction of investigation considered in this thesis regards the development of new techniques to simulate topological states of matter with cold atoms in optical lattices.We propose a scheme based on an unconventional use of a bi-chromatic optical lattice to engineer the Hamiltonians of several topological insulators and of the related non-interacting relativistic models.We also focus on the Pfaffian wavefunction, a topological state supporting non-Abelian quasi-excitations arising in the presence of three-body interactions.We present a proposal for the realization with optical lattices of systems characterized by such interactions and discuss the possibility of using such a scheme to create a topological state, such as the mentioned wavefunction.The second line of research considered in this thesis concerns the detection of a string operator in optical lattices.We report on an experiment, to which we provided theoretical support, aimed at the measurement of the non-local order parameter of a one-dimensional Mott insulator; we support the discussion with the relevant theoretical background.Although the Mott insulator is not a topological phase, the measurement of string observables is crucial to reveal the non-local order of several topological states, and the developed experimental protocol is expected to be relevant in future experiments.The third contribution of this thesis is related to the use of topological phases to build a quantum computer, which is a specific example of a quantum simulator.We focus on the important problem of understanding whether it is possible to reliably store quantum information in topological states.We consider one specific class of topological quantum memories, namely those based on a fermionic topological superconductor with zero-energy Majorana modes.At the end of the storage period, we take into account the possibility of applying an operation aimed at the recovery of the information initially encoded into the system and then diminished by the time evolution.In particular, we vii
The ability to precisely and coherently control atomic systems has improved dramatically in the last two decades, driving remarkable advancements in quantum computation and simulation. In recent years, atomic and atom-like systems have also been served as a platform to study topological phases of matter and non-equilibrium many-body physics. Integrated with rapid theoretical progress, the employment of these systems is expanding the realm of our understanding on a range of physical phenomena. In this dissertation, I draw on state-of-the-art experimental technology to develop several new ideas for controlling and applying atomic systems. In the first part of this dissertation, we propose several novel schemes to realize, detect, and probe topological phases in atomic and atom-like systems. We first theoretically study the intriguing properties of Hopf insulators, a peculiar type of topological insulators beyond the standard classification paradigm of topological phases. Using a solid-state quantum simulator, we report the first experimental observation of Hopf insulators. We demonstrate the Hopf fibration with fascinating topological links in the experiment, showing clear signals of topological phase transitions for the underlying Hamiltonian. Next, we propose a feasible experimental scheme to realize the chiral topological insulator in three dimensions. They are a type of topological insulators protected by the chiral symmetry and have thus far remained unobserved in experiment. We then introduce a method to directly measure topological invariants in cold-atom experiments. This detection scheme is general and applicable to probe of different topological insulators in any spatial dimension. In another study, we theoretically discover a new type of topological gapless rings, dubbed a Weyl exceptional ring, in three-dimensional dissipative cold atomic systems. In the second part of this dissertation, we focus on the application of atomic systems in quantum computation and simulation. Trapped atomic ions are one of the leading platforms to build a scalable, universal quantum computer. The common one-dimensional setup, however, greatly limits the system's scalability. By solving the critical problem of micromotion, we propose a two-dimensional architecture for scalable trapped-ion quantum computation. Hamiltonian tomography for many-body quantum systems is essential for benchmarking quantum computation and simulation. By employing dynamical decoupling, we propose a scalable scheme for full Hamiltonian tomography. The required number of measurements increases only polynomially with the system size, in contrast to an exponential scaling in common methods. Finally, we work toward the goal of demonstrating quantum supremacy. A number of sampling tasks, such as the boson sampling problem, have been proposed to be classically intractable under mild assumptions. An intermediate quantum computer can efficiently solve the sampling problem, but the correct operation of the device is not known to be classically verifiable. Toward practical verification, we present an experimental friendly scheme to extract useful and robust information from the quantum boson samplers based on coarse-grained measurements. In a separate study, we introduce a new model built from translation-invariant Ising-interacting spins. This model possesses several advantageous properties, catalyzing the ultimate experimental demonstration of quantum supremacy.
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.
Quantum states of matter at zero temperature are called quantum phases, which are characterized by their symmetries and topology. If two quantum phases cannot be related by symmetry-preserving continuous transformations, they are defined to be topologically distinct. The zero-temperature transitions among quantum phases are quantum phase transitions. Quantum phase transitions that happen among topologically distinct phases are called topological quantum phase transitions. The study of topological quantum phases and topological quantum phase transitions is a central topic in condensed matter physics.My research on quantum phases has been focused on the theoretical study of topologically nontrivial quantum phases in the crystals governed by non-interacting Hamiltonians, including topological insulator phases, topological semimetal phases, topological superconductor phases, and so on. First, we proposed a sufficient criterion that can efficiently determine whether a three-dimensional crystal is a topological semimetal or not, based on the compatibility of different expressions for a special topological invariant, the quantized bulk average value of the effective axion field. Second, we predicted the existence of various topological insulator phases and topological semimetal phases in half-Heusler materials. Third, we proposed the magnetic-resonance-induced current as a feasible experimental probe of a special kind of topological insulators, called the axion insulators. Fourth, we proposed a new pairing mixing mechanism, the singlet-quintet mixing, for superconductors with spin-3/2 fermions, demonstrated the topological superconductor phase induced by it, and studied various properties of it, including spin-susceptibility, upper critical field, stability against the disorder, and surface Majorana flat bands.Besides the topological quantum phases, I have also worked on quantum phase transitions. First, we constructed the first theoretical model for the emergent supersymmetry at a discontinuous quantum phase transition and proposed to realize it on the surface of a topological superconductor. Second, we proposed the discontinuous change of piezoelectricity as a probe of two-dimensional topological quantum phase transitions between insulating phases, through a systematic study of all the relevant gap closing cases. In this dissertation, I first briefly introduce the basic concepts in the field of topological quantum phases and topological quantum phase transitions with a focus on the crystals governed by noninteracting Hamiltonians. Then, I review in detail all my first-authored research works mentioned above. My other research works are briefly mentioned.
Understanding the interplay between symmetries and phases lies at the heart of characterizing states of matter. The conventional Landau's paradigm associates local ordered states with symmetry breaking, but this paradigm fails to include gapped topological phases, which can only be distinguished by the global topological invariant and the present of gapless edge modes at open boundaries. In this thesis, variety of states of matter is enriched from two aspects: a new paradigm of phases that incorporates both symmetry broken phase and topological phase, and exotic topological phases that are realized in different degree of freedoms of the same system. The two aspects are explored by studying corresponding one dimensional fermionic models. Besides gapped phases, exotic quasiparticle interferences of gapless topological systems are also investigated. \n \nThe first chapter serves as a theoretical basis for the next two chapters by giving an introduction to topological phases in one dimension. In particular, a bosonization method is introduced to describe topological degeneracy and edge zero modes, which is favoured by the ability to deal with interactions as well as to uncover the phenomena of spin-charge separation. \n \nIn the second chapter a new paradigm of phases is proposed and investigated that incorporates both symmetry broken phases and symmetry-protected topological phases. Through exact-solvable models bond spin density wave(BSDW) states are proposed as candidates for this new paradigm, which are ZZ2 symmetry breaking due to spontaneous dimerization and yet each is topological nontrivial with edge zero modes of fractional fermions. More general lattice models are constructed, and it is shown that BSDW exists in a considerable regime of parameters for a family of lattice models, from both mean-field analysis and bosonization. \n \nIn the third chapter, we give an effective field description for spin-charge separated edge modes consisting of both Majorana modes and fractional fermions, and demonstrate how to harvest both simultaneously in a spinless fermionic ladder with particle-hole symmetry and single-chain fermion parity. Further, the idea of spin-charge separated edge modes is applied to reinterpret the prominent Haldane phase of spin-1 chain in its equivalent spin-frac12 fermionic model. \n \nIn contrast to the above two theoretically oriented topics that aim to add variety to topological phases, the third topic establishes a bridge between abstract concepts for topological systems to remarkable features that can be detected in experiments. The last chapter reveals how topological charges for topological Fermi points, through exhibiting exotic quasiparticle interference in the presence of impurities, could be visualized in STS measurements. \nThe generalized joint density of states(GJDOS) is applied to address effects from the geometry of band dispersion and topological charges separately. Both analytical results and numerical simulation suggest distinct and robust quasiparticle interference features as indicators for topological charges that can be accessed by FT-STS experiments.
We systematically study topological phases of insulators and superconductors (or superfluids) in three spatial dimensions. We find that there exist three-dimensional (3D) topologically nontrivial insulators or superconductors in five out of ten symmetry classes introduced in seminal work by Altland and Zirnbauer within the context of random matrix theory, more than a decade ago. One of these is the recently introduced Z2 topological insulator in the symplectic (or spin-orbit) symmetry class. We show that there exist precisely four more topological insulators. For these systems, all of which are time-reversal invariant in three dimensions, the space of insulating ground states satisfying certain discrete symmetry properties is partitioned into topological sectors that are separated by quantum phase transitions. Three of the above five topologically nontrivial phases can be realized as time-reversal invariant superconductors. In these the different topological sectors are characterized by an integer winding number defined in momentum space. When such 3D topological insulators are terminated by a two-dimensional surface, they support a number (which may be an arbitrary nonvanishing even number for singlet pairing) of Dirac fermion (Majorana fermion when spin-rotation symmetry is completely broken) surface modes which remain gapless under arbitrary perturbations of the Hamiltonian that preserve the characteristic discrete symmetries, including disorder. In particular, these surface modes completely evade Anderson localization from random impurities. These topological phases can be thought of as three-dimensional analogs of well-known paired topological phases in two spatial dimensions such as the spinless chiral $({p}_{x}\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}i{p}_{y})$-wave superconductor (or Moore-Read Pfaffian state). In the corresponding topologically nontrivial (analogous to ``weak pairing'') and topologically trivial (analogous to ``strong pairing'') 3D phases, the wave functions exhibit markedly distinct behavior. When an electromagnetic U(1) gauge field and fluctuations of the gap functions are included in the dynamics, the superconducting phases with nonvanishing winding number possess nontrivial topological ground-state degeneracies.