No Arabic abstract
We show that strained or deformed honeycomb lattices are promising platforms to realize fractional topological quantum states in the absence of any magnetic field. The strained induced pseudo magnetic fields are oppositely oriented in the two valleys [1-3] and can be as large as 60-300 Tesla as reported in recent experiments [4,5]. For strained graphene at neutrality, a spin or a valley polarized state is predicted depending on the value of the onsite Coulomb interaction. At fractional filling, the unscreened Coulomb interaction leads to a valley polarized Fractional Quantum Hall liquid which spontaneously breaks time reversal symmetry. Motivated by artificial graphene systems [5-8], we consider tuning the short range part of interactions, and demonstrate that exotic valley symmetric states, including a valley Fractional Topological Insulator and a spin triplet superconductor, can be stabilized by such interaction engineering.
The second law of thermodynamics points to the existence of an `arrow of time, along which entropy only increases. This arises despite the time-reversal symmetry (TRS) of the microscopic laws of nature. Within quantum theory, TRS underpins many interesting phenomena, most notably topological insulators and the Haldane phase of quantum magnets. Here, we demonstrate that such TRS-protected effects are fundamentally unstable against coupling to an environment. Irrespective of the microscopic symmetries, interactions between a quantum system and its surroundings facilitate processes which would be forbidden by TRS in an isolated system. This leads not only to entanglement entropy production and the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility, but also to the demise of TRS-protected phenomena, including those associated with certain symmetry-protected topological phases. Our results highlight the enigmatic nature of TRS in quantum mechanics, and elucidate potential challenges in utilising topological systems for quantum technologies.
With the two-band continuum model, we study the broken inversion and time-reversal symmetry state of electrons with finite-range repulsive interactions in bilayer graphene. With the analytical solution to the mean-field Hamiltonian, we obtain the electronic spectra. The ground state is gapped. In the presence of the magnetic field $B$, the energy gap grows with increasing $B$, in excellently agreement with the experimental observation. Such an energy gap behavior originates from the disappearance of a Landau level of $n$ = 0 and 1 states. The present result resolves explicitly the puzzle of the gap dependence of $B$.
The topological superconductor UPt3, has three distinct vortex phases, a strong indication of its unconventional character. Using small-angle neutron scattering we have probed the vortex lattice in the UPt3 B phase with the magnetic field along the crystal c-axis. We find a difference in the vortex lattice configuration depending on the sign of the magnetic field relative to the field direction established upon entering the B phase at low temperature in a field sweep, showing that the vortices in this material posses an internal degree of freedom. This observation is facilitated by the discovery of a field driven non-monotonic vortex lattice rotation, driven by competing effects of the superconducting gap distortion and the vortex-core structure. From our bulk measurements we infer that the superconducting order parameter in the UPt3 B phase breaks time reversal symmetry and exhibits chiral symmetry with respect to the c-axis.
We study the behavior of spinless fermions in superconducting state, in which the phases of the superconducting order parameter depend on the direction of the link. We find that the energy of the superconductor depends on the phase differences of the superconducting order parameter. The solutions for the phases corresponding to the energy minimuma, lead to a topological superconducting state with the nontrivial Chern numbers. We focus our quantitative analysis on the properties of topological states of superconductors with different crystalline symmetry and show that the phase transition in the topological superconducting state is result of spontaneous breaking of time-reversal symmetry in the superconducting state. The peculiarities in the chiral gapless edge modes behavior are studied, the Chern numbers are calculated.
We provide numerical evidence that the Onsager symmetry remains valid for systems subject to a spatially dependent magnetic field, in spite of the broken time-reversal symmetry. In addition, for the simplest case in which the field strength varies only in one direction, we analytically derive the result. For the generic case, a qualitative explanation is provided.