We numerically investigate the surface states of a strong topological insulator in the presence of strong electron-electron interactions. We choose a spherical topological insulator geometry to make the surface amenable to a finite size analysis. The
single-particle problem maps to that of Landau orbitals on the sphere with a magnetic monopole at the center that has unit strength and opposite sign for electrons with opposite spin. Assuming density-density contact interactions, we find superconducting and anomalous (quantum) Hall phases for attractive and repulsive interactions, respectively, as well as chiral fermion and chiral Majorana fermion boundary modes between different phases. Our setup is preeminently adapted to the search for topologically ordered surface terminations that could be microscopically stabilized by tailored surface interaction profiles.
We present a polarization resolved study of the low energy band structure in the optimally doped iron pnictide superconductor Ba$_{0.6}$K$_{0.4}$Fe$_2$As$_2$ (T$_c$=37K) using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Polarization-contrasted measure
ments are used to identify and trace all three low energy hole-like bands predicted by local density approximation (LDA) calculations. The photoemitted electrons reveal an inconsistency with LDA-predicted symmetries along the $Gamma$-X high symmetry momentum axis, due to unexpectedly strong rotational anisotropy in electron kinetics. We evaluate many-body effects such as Mott-Hubbard interactions that are likely to underlie the anomaly, and discuss how the observed deviations from LDA band structure affect the energetics of iron pnictide Cooper pairing in the hole doped regime.
We use extensive DMRG calculations to show that a classification of SU(n) spin chains with regard to the existence of spinon confinement and hence a Haldane gap obtained previously for valence bond solid models applies to SU(n) Heisenberg chains as w
ell. In particular, we observe spinon confinement due to a next-nearest neighbor interaction in the SU(4) representation 10 spin chain.
The DMRG method is applied to integrable models of antiferromagnetic spin chains for fundamental and higher representations of SU(2), SU(3), and SU(4). From the low energy spectrum and the entanglement entropy, we compute the central charge and the
primary field scaling dimensions. These parameters allow us to identify uniquely the Wess-Zumino-Witten models capturing the low energy sectors of the models we consider.
