No Arabic abstract
Topological phase transitions in a three-dimensional (3D) topological insulator (TI) with an exchange field of strength $g$ are studied by calculating spin Chern numbers $C^pm(k_z)$ with momentum $k_z$ as a parameter. When $|g|$ exceeds a critical value $g_c$, a transition of the 3D TI into a Weyl semimetal occurs, where two Weyl points appear as critical points separating $k_z$ regions with different first Chern numbers. For $|g|<g_c$, $C^pm(k_z)$ undergo a transition from $pm 1$ to 0 with increasing $|k_z|$ to a critical value $k_z^{tiny C}$. Correspondingly, surface states exist for $|k_z| < k_z^{tiny C}$, and vanish for $|k_z| ge k_z^{tiny C}$. The transition at $|k_z| = k_z^{tiny C}$ is acompanied by closing of spin spectrum gap rather than energy gap.
Contrary to the conventional wisdom in Hermitian systems, a continuous quantum phase transition between gapped phases is shown to occur without closing the energy gap $Delta$ in non-Hermitian quantum many-body systems. Here, the relevant length scale $xi simeq v_{rm LR}/Delta$ diverges because of the breakdown of the Lieb-Robinson bound on the velocity (i.e., unboundedness of $v_{rm LR}$) rather than vanishing of the energy gap $Delta$. The susceptibility to a change in the system parameter exhibits a singularity due to nonorthogonality of eigenstates. As an illustrative example, we present an exactly solvable model by generalizing Kitaevs toric-code model to a non-Hermitian regime.
The traditional concept of phase transitions has, in recent years, been widened in a number of interesting ways. The concept of a topological phase transition separating phases with a different ground state topology, rather than phases of different symmetries, has become a large widely studied field in its own right. Additionally an analogy between phase transitions, described by non-analyticities in the derivatives of the free energy, and non-analyticities which occur in dynamically evolving correlation functions has been drawn. These are called dynamical phase transitions and one is often now far from the equilibrium situation. In these short lecture notes we will give a brief overview of the history of these concepts, focusing in particular on the way in which dynamical phase transitions themselves can be used to shed light on topological phase transitions and topological phases. We will go on to focus, first, on the effect which the topologically protected edge states, which are one of the interesting consequences of topological phases, have on dynamical phase transitions. Second we will consider what happens in the experimentally relevant situations where the system begins either in a thermal state rather than the ground state, or exchanges particles with an external environment.
We investigate the Loschmidt amplitude and dynamical quantum phase transitions in multiband one dimensional topological insulators. For this purpose we introduce a new solvable multiband model based on the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, generalized to unit cells containing many atoms but with the same symmetry properties. Such models have a richer structure of dynamical quantum phase transitions than the simple two-band topological insulator models typically considered previously, with both quasiperiodic and aperiodic dynamical quantum phase transitions present. Moreover the aperiodic transitions can still occur for quenches within a single topological phase. We also investigate the boundary contributions from the presence of the topologically protected edge states of this model. Plateaus in the boundary return rate are related to the topology of the time evolving Hamiltonian, and hence to a dynamical bulk-boundary correspondence. We go on to consider the dynamics of the entanglement entropy generated after a quench, and its potential relation to the critical times of the dynamical quantum phase transitions. Finally, we investigate the fidelity susceptibility as an indicator of the topological phase transitions, and find a simple scaling law as a function of the number of bands of our multiband model which is found to be the same for both bulk and boundary fidelity susceptibilities.
Recent years saw the complete classification of topological band structures, revealing an abundance of topological crystalline insulators. Here we theoretically demonstrate the existence of topological materials beyond this framework, protected by quasicrystalline symmetries. We construct a higher-order topological phase protected by a point group symmetry that is impossible in any crystalline system. Our tight-binding model describes a superconductor on a quasicrystalline Ammann-Beenker tiling which hosts localized Majorana zero modes at the corners of an octagonal sample. The Majorana modes are protected by particle-hole symmetry and by the combination of an 8-fold rotation and in-plane reflection symmetry. We find a bulk topological invariant associated with the presence of these zero modes, and show that they are robust against large symmetry preserving deformations, as long as the bulk remains gapped. The nontrivial bulk topology of this phase falls outside all currently known classification schemes.
A recently proposed curvature renormalization group scheme for topological phase transitions defines a generic `curvature function as a function of the parameters of the theory and shows that topological phase transitions are signalled by the divergence of this function at certain parameters values, called critical points, in analogy with usual phase transitions. A renormalization group procedure was also introduced as a way of flowing away from the critical point towards a fixed point, where an appropriately defined correlation function goes to zero and topological quantum numbers characterising the phase are easy to compute. In this paper, using two independent models - a model in the AIII symmetry class and a model in the BDI symmetry class - in one dimension as examples, we show that there are cases where the fixed point curve and the critical point curve appear to intersect, which turn out to be multi-critical points, and focus on understanding its implications.