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Published February 5, 2015 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

Composite Dirac liquids: parent states for symmetric surface topological order

Abstract

We introduce exotic gapless states—"composite Dirac liquids"—that can appear at a strongly interacting surface of a three-dimensional electronic topological insulator. Composite Dirac liquids exhibit a gap to all charge excitations but nevertheless feature a single massless Dirac cone built from emergent electrically neutral fermions. These states thus comprise electrical insulators that, interestingly, retain thermal properties similar to those of the noninteracting topological insulator surface. A variety of novel fully gapped phases naturally descend from composite Dirac liquids. Most remarkably, we show that gapping the neutral fermions via Cooper pairing—which crucially does not violate charge conservation—yields symmetric non-Abelian topologically ordered surface phases captured in several recent works. Other (Abelian) topological orders emerge upon alternatively gapping the neutral Dirac cone with magnetism. We establish a hierarchical relationship between these descendant phases and expose an appealing connection to paired states of composite Fermi liquids arising in the half filled Landau level of two-dimensional electron gases. To controllably access these states we exploit a quasi-1D deformation of the original electronic Dirac cone that enables us to analytically address the fate of the strongly interacting surface. The algorithm we develop applies quite broadly and further allows the construction of symmetric surface topological orders for recently introduced bosonic topological insulators.

Additional Information

© 2015 The Authors. Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. Received 22 October 2014; published 5 February 2015. We are indebted to David Clarke, Lukasz Fidkowski, Matthew Fisher, Eduardo Fradkin, Roger Mong, Lesik Motrunich, Yuval Oreg, Xiaoliang Qi, T. Senthil, Ari Turner, and Ashvin Vishwanath for illuminating conversations on this work. We also acknowledge funding from the NSF through Grant No. DMR-1341822 (J. A.); the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (J. A.); the Caltech Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center with support of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation through Grant No. GBMF1250; and the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech. D. F. M. and A. E. contributed equally to this work.

Attached Files

Published - PhysRevX.5.011011.pdf

Submitted - 1410.4201v1.pdf

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