Contributor info: Prof. Tigran Sedrakyan

Jun-Hyung Bae, Tigran Sedrakyan, Saurabh Maiti

SciPost Phys. 15, 139 (2023) · published 5 October 2023 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The increased ability to engineer two-dimensional (2D) systems, either using materials, photonic lattices, or cold atoms, has led to the search for 2D structures with interesting properties. One such property is the presence of flat bands. Typically, the presence of these requires long-ranged hoppings, fine-tuning of nearest neighbor hoppings, or breaking time-reversal symmetry by using a staggered flux distribution in the unit cell. We provide a prescription based on carrying out projections from a parent system to generate different flat band systems. We identify the conditions for maintaining the flatness and identify a path-exchange symmetry in such systems that cause the flat band to be degenerate with the other dispersive ones. Breaking this symmetry leads to lifting the degeneracy while still preserving the flatness of the band. This technique does not require changing the topology nor breaking time-reversal symmetry as was suggested earlier in the literature. The prescription also eliminates the need for any fine-tuning. Moreover, it is shown that the subsequent projected systems inherit the precise fine-tuning conditions that were discussed in the literature for similar systems, in order to have and isolate a flat band. As examples, we demonstrate the use of our prescription to arrive at the flat band conditions for popular systems like the Kagomé, the Lieb, and the Dice lattices. Finally, we are also able to show that a flat band exists in a recently proposed chiral spin-liquid state of the Kagomé lattice only if it is associated with a gauge field that produces a flux modulation of the Chern-Simons type.

Ke Wang, T. A. Sedrakyan

SciPost Phys. 12, 134 (2022) · published 20 April 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We consider Lifshitz criticalities with dynamical exponent $z=2$ that emerge in a class of topological chains. There, such a criticality plays a fundamental role in describing transitions between symmetry-enriched conformal field theories (CFTs). We report that, at such critical points in one spatial dimension, the finite-size correction to the energy scales with system size, $L$, as $\sim L^{-2}$, with universal and anomalously large coefficient. The behavior originates from the specific dispersion around the Fermi surface, $\epsilon \propto \pm k^2$. We also show that the entanglement entropy exhibits at the criticality a non-logarithmic dependence on $l/L$, where $l$ is the length of the sub-system. In the limit of $l\ll L$, the maximally-entangled ground state has the entropy, $S(l/L)=S_0+(l/L)\log(l/L)$. Here $S_0$ is some non-universal entropy originating from short-range correlations. We show that the novel entanglement originates from the long-range correlation mediated by a zero mode in the low energy sector. The work paves the way to study finite-size effects and entanglement entropy around Lifshitz criticalities and offers an insight into transitions between symmetry-enriched criticalities.