Interaction-Driven Spontaneous Quantum Hall Effect on a Kagome Lattice
Name
PhysRevLett.117.096402.pdf
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Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Zhu, W.
Gong, Shou-Shu
Zeng, Tian-Sheng
Fu, Liang
Sheng, D. N.
Date Issued
August 2016
Journal
Physical Review Letters
Publisher
American Physical Society
Citation
Zhu, W. et al. “Interaction-Driven Spontaneous Quantum Hall Effect on a Kagome Lattice.” Physical Review Letters 117.9 (2016): n. pag. © 2016 American Physical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Topological states of matter have been widely studied as being driven by an external magnetic field, intrinsic spin-orbital coupling, or magnetic doping. Here, we unveil an interaction-driven spontaneous quantum Hall effect (a Chern insulator) emerging in an extended fermion-Hubbard model on a kagome lattice, based on a state-of-the-art density-matrix renormalization group on cylinder geometry and an exact diagonalization in torus geometry. We first demonstrate that the proposed model exhibits an incompressible liquid phase with doublet degenerate ground states as time-reversal partners. The explicit spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking is determined by emergent uniform circulating loop currents between nearest neighbors. Importantly, the fingerprint topological nature of the ground state is characterized by quantized Hall conductance. Thus, we identify the liquid phase as a quantum Hall phase, which provides a “proof-of-principle” demonstration of the interaction-driven topological phase in a topologically trivial noninteracting band.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.096402
