The concept of topology in condensed matter physics has led to the discovery of rich and exotic physics in recent years. Especially when strong correlations are included, phenomenons such as fractionalization and anyonic particle statistics can arise. In this thesis, we study several systems hosting topological phases of interacting fermions. In the first part, we consider one-dimensional systems of parafermions, which are generalizations of Majorana fermions, in the presence of a Z_N charge symmetry. We classify the symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases that can occur in these systems using the projective representations of the symmetries and find a finite number of distinct phases depending on the prime factorization of N. The different phases exhibit characteristic degeneracies in their entanglement spectrum (ES). Apart from these SPT phases, we report the occurrence of parafermion condensate phases for certain values of N. When including an additional Z_N symmetry, we find a non-Abelian group structure under the addition of phases. In the second part of the thesis, we focus on two-dimensional lattice models of spinless fermions. First, we demonstrate the detection of a fractional Chern insulator (FCI) phase in the Haldane honeycomb model on an infinite cylinder by means of the density-matrix renormalization group (DMRG). We report the calculation of several quantities characterizing the topological order of the state, i.e., (i)~the Hall conductivity, (ii)~the spectral flow and level counting in the ES, (iii)~the topological entanglement entropy, and (iv)~the charge and topological spin of the quasiparticles. Since we have access to sufficiently large system sizes without band projection with DMRG, we are in addition able to investigate the transition from a metal to the FCI at small interactions which we find to be of first order. In a further study, we consider a time-reversal symmetric model on the honeycomb lattice where a Chern insulator (CI) induced by next-nearest neighbor interactions has been predicted by mean field theory. However, various subsequent studies challenged this picture and it was still unclear whether the CI would survive quantum fluctuations. We therefore map out the phase diagram of the model as a function of the interactions on an infinite cylinder with DMRG and find evidence for the absence of the CI phase. However, we report the detection of two novel charge-ordered phases and corroborate the existence of the remaining phases that had been predicted in mean field theory. Furthermore, we characterize the transitions between the various phases by studying the behavior of correlation length and entanglement entropy at the phase boundaries. Finally, we develop an improvement to the DMRG algorithm for fermionic lattice models on cylinders. By using a real space representation in the direction along the cylinder and a real space representation in the perpendicular direction, we are able to use the momentum around the cylinder as conserved quantity to reduce computational costs. We benchmark the method by studying the interacting Hofstadter model and report a considerable speedup in computation time and a severely reduced memory usage.
Quantum phases of matter can be classified into two kinds: gapped or gapless, depending on whether the equilibrium ground state is separated from excited states by a finite energy window or not in the thermodynamic limit. Topology has played an important role in the understanding of both gapped and gapless phases of matter. This thesis uncovers several robust physical properties of both kinds of systems which are largely unexplored before. \\ For gapped systems, we study topological orders, which are characterized by the existence of anyonic quasiparticles with fractional braiding statistics. In the first part, we introduce a family of Abelian quantum Hall insulators, at filling factors
ν=p/2q for bosonic systems and
ν=p/(p+2q) for fermionic systems, with
p and
q being two coprime integers. These states are termed the \textit{nondiagonal} quantum Hall states, which are constructed in a coupled wire model that exhibits an intimate relation to the nondiagonal conformal field theory and has a constrained pattern of motion for anyons. We unveil a nontrivial interplay between charge symmetry and translation symmetry in this system, and establish the nondiagonal quantum Hall states as symmetry-enriched topological orders. In the second part, we introduce a related model of interacting electrons, but in the absence of a strong quantizing magnetic field, known as the \textit{toric code insulator}. It is constructed from a two-dimensional array of strongly coupled one-dimensional topological superconductors, which feature electron fractionalization and possesses anyonic excitations described by the
Z2 topological order. The motion of anyons is again constrained, and different types of anyons can be related by the translation symmetry. Nondiagonal quantum Hall states and the toric code insulator are convincing examples that itinerant electronic systems can realize interesting symmetry-enriched topological orders.\\ For gapless quantum matters we focus on a particularly familiar class, the metals, but we uncover their topological aspects which were much less appreciated. Every metal is characterized by a Fermi surface of gapless excitations, and the Fermi surface surrounds a manifold in the momentum space, known as the Fermi sea. The ground state of a non-interacting metal, or a Fermi gas, consists of all single-electron states within the Fermi sea. The shape of the Fermi sea has a natural topological characterization in terms of the Euler characteristic
χF, and a fundamental question that we address in this thesis is: \textbf{does
χF imply any robust physical properties in metals, and how can they be measured?} In the third part of the thesis,
χF is connected to physically measurable quantities, such as equal-time density-density correlation functions, and multipartite entanglement measures, such as the mutual information. Particularly, for three dimensions, we establish that the 4-partite mutual information is a robust probe of the Fermi sea topology even in the presence of Fermi-liquid interactions. In the last part, we focus on two dimensions, and propose an experimentally accessible platform to probe
χF for any two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) that respects time-reversal symmetry. The proposed experimental setup is a Josephson
π-junction, and we predict that the electrical transport in the direction \textit{along} the junction exhibits a current-rectification effect that is controlled by the underlying Fermi sea topology. Due to the relation to Andreev state transport, we term this effect \textit{topological Andreev rectification}. The size of rectification is quantified by a \textit{nonlocal rectified conductance}, which is established to attain an integer quantized value that equals
χF (in unit of
e2/h). Extensive numerical simulations are performed to support our theoretical proposal, and material platforms such as InAs heterostructures and graphene are identified as promising candidates to demonstrate this effect.
The interplay among symmetry, topology and condensed matter systems has deepened our understandings of matter and lead to tremendous recent progresses in finding new topological phases of matter such as topological insulators, superconductors and semi-metals. Most examples of the aforementioned topological materials are free fermion systems, in this thesis, however, we focus on their strongly correlated counterparts where electron-electron interactions play a major role. With interactions, exotic topological phases and quantum critical points with fractionalized quantum degrees of freedom emerge. In the first part of this thesis, we study the problem of resonant tunneling through a quantum dot in a spinful Luttinger liquid. It provides the simplest example of a (0+1)d system with symmetry-protected phase transitions. We show that the problem is equivalent to a two channel SU(3) Kondo problem and can be mapped to a quantum Brownian motion model on a Kagome lattice. Utilizing boundary conformal field theory, we find the universal peak conductance and compute the scaling behavior of the resonance line-shape.\nFor the second part, we present a model of interacting Majorana fermions that describes a superconducting phase with a topological order characterized by the Fibonacci topological field theory. Our theory is based on a SO(7)1=SO(7)1/(G2)1 x (G2)1 coset construction and implemented by a solvable two-dimensional network model. In addition, we predict a closely related ''anti-Fibonacci'' phase, whose topological order is characterized by the tricritical Ising model. Finally, we propose an interferometer that generalizes the Z2 Majorana interferometer and directly probes the Fibonacci non-Abelian statistics.\nFor the third part, we argue that a correlated fluid of electrons and holes can exhibit fractional quantum Hall effects at zero magnetic field. We first show that a Chern insulator can be realized as a free fermion model with p-wave(m=1) excitonic pairing. Its ground state wavefunction is then worked out and generalized to m>1. We give several pieces of evidence that this conjectured wavefunction correctly describes a topological phase, dubbed ''fractional excitonic insulator'', within the same universality class as the corresponding Laughlin state at filling 1/m. We present physical arguments that gapless states with higher angular momentum pairing between energy bands are conducive to forming the fractional excitonic insulator in the presence of repulsive interactions. Without interactions, these gapless states appear at topological phase transitions which separate the trivial insulator from a Chern insulator with higher Chern number. Since the nonvanishing density of states at these higher angular momentum band inversion transitions can give rise to interesting many-body effects, we introduce a series of minimal lattice models realizations in two dimensions. We also study the effect of rotational symmetry broken electron-hole exciton condensation in our lattice models using mean field theory.
This thesis is a study of three categories of problems in fermionic systems for which topology plays an important role: (i) The properties of zero modes arising in systems of fermions interacting with a bosonic background, with a special focus on Majorana modes arising in the superconductor state. We propose a method for counting Majorana modes and we study a mechanism for controlling their number parity in lattice systems, two questions that are of relevance to the protection of quantum bits. (ii) The study of dispersionless bands in two dimensions as a platform for correlated physics, where it is shown the possibility of stabilizing the fractional quantum Hall effect in a flat band with Chern number. (iii) The extension of the hierarchy of quantum Hall fluids to the case of time-reversal symmetric incompressible ground states describing a phase of strongly interacting topological insulators in two dimensions.
With the discovery of the integer quantum Hall effect by von Klitzing and collaborators in 1980, the mathematical field of topology entered the world of condensed matter physics. Almost three decades later, this eventually led to the theoretical prediction and the experimental realization of many intriguing topological materials and topology-based devices. In this Ph.D. thesis, we will study the interplay between topology and another key topic in condensed matter physics, namely the study of inter-particle interactions in many-body systems. This interplay is analyzed from two different perspectives. Firstly, we studied how the presence of electron-electron interactions affects single-electron injection into a couple of counter-propagating one-dimensional edge channels. The latter appear at the edges of topologically non-trivial systems in the quantum spin Hall regime and they can also be engineered by exploiting the integer quantum Hall effect. Because of inter-channel interactions, the injected electron splits up into a couple of counter-propagating fractional excitations. Here, we carefully study and discuss their properties by means of an analytical approach based on the Luttinger liquid theory and the bosonization method. Our results are quite relevant in the context of the so-called electron quantum optics, a fast developing field which deeply exploits the topological protection of one-dimensional edge states to study the coherent propagation of electrons in solid-state devices. As an aside, we also showed that similar analytical techniques can also be used to study the time-resolved dynamics of a Luttinger liquid subject to a sudden change of the interaction strength, a protocol known as quantum quench which is gaining more and more attention, especially within the cold-atoms community. Secondly, we study how inter-particle interactions can enhance the topological properties of strictly one-dimensional fermionic systems. More precisely, the starting point is the seminal Kitaev chain, a free-fermionic lattice model which hosts exotic Majorana zero-energy modes at its ends. The latter are extremely relevant in the context of topological quantum computation because of their non-Abelian anyonic exchange statistics. Here we show that, by properly adding electron-electron interactions to the Kitaev chain, it is possible to obtain lattice models which feature zero-energy parafermionic modes, an even more intriguing generalization of Majoranas. To this end, we develop at first an exact mapping between Z4 parafermions and ordinary fermions on a lattice. We subsequently exploit this mapping to analytically obtain an exactly solvable fermionic model hosting zero-energy parafermions. We study their properties and numerically investigate their signatures and robustness even when parameters are tuned away from the exactly solvable point.
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.