Contributor info: Prof. Wei Chen

Wei Chen, Gero von Gersdorff

SciPost Phys. Core 5, 040 (2022) · published 16 August 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The quantum geometric properties of a Bloch state in momentum space are usually described by the Berry curvature and quantum metric. In realistic gapped materials where interactions and disorder render the Bloch state not a viable starting point, we generalize these concepts by introducing dressed Berry curvature and quantum metric at finite temperature, in which the effect of many-body interactions can be included perturbatively. These quantities are extracted from the charge polarization susceptibility caused by linearly or circularly polarized electric fields, whose spectral functions can be measured from momentum-resolved exciton or infrared absorption rate. As a concrete example, we investigate Chern insulators in the presence of impurity scattering, whose results suggest that the quantum geometric properties are protected by the energy gap against many-body interactions.

Paolo Molignini, Antonio Zegarra, Evert van Nieuwenburg, R. Chitra, Wei Chen

SciPost Phys. 11, 073 (2021) · published 28 September 2021 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Topological order in solid state systems is often calculated from the integration of an appropriate curvature function over the entire Brillouin zone. At topological phase transitions where the single particle spectral gap closes, the curvature function diverges and changes sign at certain high symmetry points in the Brillouin zone. These generic properties suggest the introduction of a supervised machine learning scheme that uses only the curvature function at the high symmetry points as input data. We apply this scheme to a variety of interacting topological insulators in different dimensions and symmetry classes. We demonstrate that an artificial neural network trained with the noninteracting data can accurately predict all topological phases in the interacting cases with very little numerical effort. Intriguingly, the method uncovers a ubiquitous interaction-induced topological quantum multicriticality in the examples studied.