This article is meant as a gentle introduction to the topological terms that often play a decisive role in effective theories describing topological quantum effects in condensed matter systems. We first take up several prominent examples, mainly from
the area of quantum magnetism and superfluids/superconductors. We then briefly discuss how these ideas are now finding incarnations in the studies of symmetry-protected topological phases, which are in a sense the generalization of the concept of topological insulators to a wider range of materials, including magnets and cold atoms.
The history of modern condensed matter physics may be regarded as the competition and reconciliation between Stoners and Andersons physical pictures, where the former is based on momentum-space descriptions focusing on long wave-length fluctuations w
hile the latter is based on real-space physics emphasizing emergent localized excitations. In particular, these two view points compete with each other in various nonperturbative phenomena, which range from the problem of high T$_{c}$ superconductivity, quantum spin liquids in organic materials and frustrated spin systems, heavy-fermion quantum criticality, metal-insulator transitions in correlated electron systems such as doped silicons and two-dimensional electron systems, the fractional quantum Hall effect, to the recently discussed Fe-based superconductors. An approach to reconcile these competing frameworks is to introduce topologically nontrivial excitations into the Stoners description, which appear to be localized in either space or time and sometimes both, where scattering between itinerant electrons and topological excitations such as skyrmions, vortices, various forms of instantons, emergent magnetic monopoles, and etc. may catch nonperturbative local physics beyond the Stoners paradigm. In this review article we discuss nonperturbative effects of topological excitations on dynamics of correlated electrons. ......
A symmetry-protected topologically ordered phase is a short-range entangled state, for which some imposed symmetry prohibits the adiabatic deformation into a trivial state which lacks entanglement. In this paper we argue that magnetization plateau st
ates of one-dimensional antiferromagnets which satisfy the conditions $S-min$ odd integer, where $S$ is the spin quantum number and $m$ the magnetization per site, can be identified as symmetry-protected topological states if an inversion symmetry about the link center is present. This assertion is reached by mapping the antiferromagnet into a nonlinear sigma model type effective field theory containing a novel Berry phase term (a total derivative term) with a coefficient proportional to the quantity $S-m$, and then analyzing the topological structure of the ground state wave functional which is inherited from the latter term. A boson-vortex duality transformation is employed to examine the topological stability of the ground state in the absence/presence of a perturbation violating link-center inversion symmetry. Our prediction based on field theories is verified by means of a numerical study of the entanglement spectra of actual spin chains, which we find to exhibit twofold degeneracies when the aforementioned condition is met. We complete this study with a rigorous analysis using matrix product states.
