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An Interacting Topological Crystalline Insulator

Bela Bauer, Microsoft
Wednesday, April 27, 2016 - 2:30pm to 3:30pm
PAT INT conference room
Strongly correlated analogues of topological insulators have been explored in systems with purely on-site symmetries, such as time-reversal or charge conservation. Here, we use recently developed tensor network tools to study a quantum state of interacting bosons which is featureless in the bulk, but distinguished from an atomic insulator in that it exhibits entanglement which is protected by its spatial symmetries. These properties are encoded in a model many-body wavefunction that describes a fully symmetric insulator of bosons on the honeycomb lattice at half filling per site. We demonstrate this by computing the boundary entanglement spectra, finding a gapless entanglement edge described by a conformal field theory as well as degeneracies protected by the non-trivial action of combined charge-conservation and spatial symmetries on the edge. Our results extend to a related insulating state of electrons, with short-ranged entanglement and no band insulator analogue.​
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