Despite free-fermion systems being dubbed exactly solvable, they generically do not admit closed expressions for nonlocal quantities such as topological string correlations or measures of entanglement. We derive closed expressions for such nonlocal quantities for a dense subclass of certain classes of topological fermionic wires (classes BDI and AIII). Our results also apply to spin chains known as generalised cluster models. While there is a bijection between general models in these fermionic classes and Laurent polynomials, restricting to polynomials with degenerate zeros leads to a plethora of exact results. In particular, (1) we derive closed expressions for the string correlation functions -- the order parameters for the topological phases in these classes; (2) we obtain an exact formula for the characteristic polynomial of the correlation matrix, giving insight into the entanglement of the ground state; (3) the latter implies that the ground state can be described by a matrix product state (MPS) with a finite bond dimension in the thermodynamic limit -- an independent and explicit construction for the BDI class is given in a concurrent work (Jones, Bibo, Jobst, Pollmann, Smith, Verresen, arXiv:2105.12143); (4) for BDI models with even integer topological invariant, all non-zero eigenvalues of the transfer matrix are identified as products of zeros and inverse zeros of the aforementioned polynomial. We show how general models in these classes can be obtained by taking limits of the models studied in this work, which can be used to apply limits of our results to the general case. To the best of our knowledge, these results constitute the first application of Days formula and Gorodetskys formula from the theory of Toeplitz determinants to the context of many-body quantum physics.
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