Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: In this paper, we present an exactly solvable model for two-dimensional topological superconductors with helical Majorana edge modes protected by time-reversal symmetry. Our construction is based on the idea of decorated domain walls and makes use of the Kasteleyn orientation on a two-dimensional lattice, which was used for the construction of the symmetry protected fermion phase with ${Z}_{2}$ symmetry by Tarantino et al. and Ware et al. By decorating the time-reversal domain walls with spinful Majorana chains, we are able to construct a commuting projector Hamiltonian with zero correlation length ground state wave function that realizes a strongly interacting version of the two-dimensional topological superconductor. From our construction, it can be seen that the ${T}^{2}=\ensuremath{-}1$ transformation rule for the fermions is crucial for the existence of such a nontrivial phase; with ${T}^{2}=1$, our construction does not work.
Authors: Zitao Wang, Shang-Qiang Ning, Xie Chen
Institutions: California Institute of Technology, Tsinghua University
Language: English
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Funders: National Science Foundation, National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China, Tsinghua University, Renmin University of China, Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, California Institute of Technology, Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Division of Materials Research
OpenAlex ID: W2742895187