Topological Order in a Correlated Three-Dimensional Topological Insulator

2013/07/31 by Joseph Maciejko, Victor Chua, Gregory A. Fiete · 49 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #Effective field theory #Fermion #Ground state #Lattice (music) #Physics #Quantum #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum mechanics #State of matter #Symmetry protected topological order #Theoretical physics #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological degeneracy #Topological entropy in physics #Topological insulator #Topological order #Topological quantum number #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.str-el

paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.112.016404

published in Physical Review Letters 112(1), 016404 (American Physical Society) · 14 pages including 9 pages of supplementary information; 2 figures. Version published in Phys. Rev. Lett

openalex publication_date 2014/01/08 · arxiv created 2014/01/13 · arxiv updated 2014/01/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

Motivated by experimental progress in the growth of heavy transition metal oxides, we theoretically study a class of lattice models of interacting fermions with strong spin-orbit coupling. Focusing on interactions of intermediate strength, we derive a low-energy effective field theory for a fully gapped, topologically ordered, fractionalized state with an eightfold ground-state degeneracy. This state is a fermionic symmetry-enriched topological phase with particle-number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. The topological terms in the effective field theory describe a quantized magnetoelectric response and nontrivial mutual braiding statistics of dynamical extended vortex loops with emergent fermions in the bulk. We explicitly compute the expected mutual statistics in a specific model on the pyrochlore lattice within a slave-particle mean-field theory. We argue that our model also provides a possible condensed-matter realization of oblique confinement.

Citations

• Topological field theory of time-reversal invariant insulators
• Fractionalized topological insulators from frustrated spin models in three dimensions
• Kmatrix construction of symmetry-enriched phases of matter
• Mott physics and band topology in materials with strong spin–orbit interaction
• Topological insulators and superconductors
• Duality in Generalized Ising Models and Phase Transitions without Local Order Parameters
• Z2-slave-spin theory for strongly correlated fermions
• Classification of symmetry enriched topological phases with exactly solvable models
• Witten effect in a crystalline topological insulator
• Effective field theories for topological insulators by functional bosonization
• Topological Insulators
• Quantum orders and symmetric spin liquids