Theory of interacting topological crystalline insulators

Abstract

We study the effect of electron interactions in topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) protected by mirror symmetry, which are realized in the SnTe material class and host multivalley Dirac fermion surface states. We find that interactions reduce the integer classification of noninteracting TCIs in three dimensions, indexed by the mirror Chern number, to a finite group Z[subscript 8]. In particular, we explicitly construct a microscopic interaction Hamiltonian to gap eight flavors of Dirac fermions on the TCI surface, while preserving the mirror symmetry. Our construction builds on interacting edge states of U(1) × Z[subscript 2] symmetry-protected topological phases of fermions in two dimensions, which we classify. Our work reveals a deep connection between three-dimensional topological phases protected by spatial symmetries and two-dimensional topological phases protected by internal symmetries.