Even if a noninteracting system has zero Berry curvature everywhere in the Brillouin zone, it is possible to introduce interactions that stabilise a fractional Chern insulator. These interactions necessarily break time-reversal symmetry (either spont
aneously or explicitly) and have the effect of altering the underlying band structure. We outline a number of ways in which this may be achieved, and show how similar interactions may also be used to create a (time-reversal symmetric) fractional topological insulator. While our approach is rigorous in the limit of long range interactions, we show numerically that even for short range interactions a fractional Chern insulator can be stabilised in a band with zero Berry curvature.
Topological quantum computation started as a niche area of research aimed at employing particles with exotic statistics, called anyons, for performing quantum computation. Soon it evolved to include a wide variety of disciplines. Advances in the unde
rstanding of anyon properties inspired new quantum algorithms and helped in the characterisation of topological phases of matter and their experimental realisation. The conceptual appeal of topological systems as well as their promise for building fault-tolerant quantum technologies fuelled the fascination in this field. This `focus on brings together several of the latest developments in the field and facilitates the synergy between different approaches.
In a recent paper by Neupert, Santos, Chamon, and Mudry [Phys. Rev. B 86, 165133 (2012)] it is claimed that there is an elementary formula for the Hall conductivity of fractional Chern insulators. We show that the proposed formula cannot generally be
correct, and we suggest one possible source of the error. Our reasoning can be generalized to show no quantity (such as Hall conductivity) expected to be constant throughout an entire phase of matter can possibly be given as the expectation of any time independent short ranged operator.
We study the effects of Landau level mixing in the limit of weak electron interaction. We use a numerical method to obtain the two- and three-body corrections to quantum Hall pseudopotentials, which are exact to lowest order in the Landau level mixin
g parameter. Our results are in general agreement with certain analytic results (some derived here, some derived by other authors) in the thermodynamic limit. We find that the convergence to this thermodynamic limit can be slow. This suggests that errors could occur if one tries to use pseudopotentials derived in a thermodynamic limit for numerical work on finite systems.
We show how to compute the exact partition function for lattice statistical-mechanical models whose Boltzmann weights obey a special crossing symmetry. The crossing symmetry equates partition functions on different trivalent graphs, allowing a transf
ormation to a graph where the partition function is easily computed. The simplest example is counting the number of nets without ends on the honeycomb lattice, including a weight per branching. Other examples include an Ising model on the Kagome lattice with three-spin interactions, dimers on any graph of corner-sharing triangles, and non-crossing loops on the honeycomb lattice, where multiple loops on each edge are allowed. We give several methods for obtaining models with this crossing symmetry, one utilizing discrete groups and another anyon fusion rules. We also present results indicating that for models which deviate slightly from having crossing symmetry, a real-space decimation (renormalization-group-like) procedure restores the crossing symmetry.
We propose an experiment to explore the magnetic phase transitions in interacting fermionic Hubbard systems, and describe how to obtain the ferromagnetic phase diagram of itinerant electron systems from these observations. In addition signatures of f
erromagnetic correlations in the observed ground states are found: for large trap radii (trap radius $R_T > 4$, in units of coherence length $xi$), ground states are topological in nature -- a skyrmion in 2D, and a hedgehog in 3D.
