A 3D fermionic topological insulator has a gapless Dirac surface state protected by time-reversal symmetry and charge conservation symmetry. The surface state can be gapped by introducing ferromagnetism to break time-reversal symmetry, introducing superconductivity to break charge conservation, or entering a topological phase. In this paper, we construct a minimal gapped topological phase that preserves both time-reversal and charge conservation symmetries and supports Ising-type non-Abelian anyons. This phase can be understood heuristically as emerging from a surface s-wave superconducting state via the condensation of eight-vortex composites. The topological phase inherits vortices supporting Majorana zero modes from the surface superconducting state. However, since it is time-reversal invariant, the surface topological phase is a distinct phase from the Ising topological phase, which can be viewed as a quantum-disordered spin-polarized p_x + i p_y superconductor. We discuss the anyon model of this topological phase and the manner in which time-reversal symmetry is realized in it. We also study the interfaces between the topological state and other surface gapped phases.
The gapless surface Dirac cone of time reversal invariant topological insulators is protected by time reversal symmetry due to the Kramers' theorem. Spin degree of freedom is usually required since Kramers' theorem only guarantees double degeneracy for spinful fermions, but not for spinless fermions. In this paper, we present an antiferromagnetic spinless model, which breaks time reversal symmetry. Similar to time reversal invariant topological insulators, this model possesses a topologically non-trivial phase with a single surface Dirac cone, which is protected by the combination of time reve…
We calculate supercurrent across a two-dimensional topological insulator subjected to an external magnetic field. When the edge states of a narrow two-dimensional topological insulator are hybridized, an external magnetic field can close the hybridization gap, thus driving a quantum phase transition from insulator to semimetal states of the topological insulator. We find a sign reversal of the supercurrent at the quantum phase transition revealing intrinsic properties of topological insulators via Josephson effect.
We explore the 32 crystallographic point groups and identify topological phases of matter with robust surface modes. For n =3,4 and 6 of the C_{nv} groups, we find the first-known 3D topological insulators without spin-orbit coupling, and with surface modes that are protected only by point groups, i.e., not needing time-reversal symmetry. To describe these C_{nv} systems, we introduce the notions of (a) a halved mirror chirality: an integer invariant which characterizes half-mirror-planes in the 3D Brillouin zone, and (b) a bent Chern number: the traditional TKNN invariant generalized to bent …
Chern insulator ferromagnets are characterized by a quantized anomalous Hall effect, and have so far been identified experimentally in magnetically-doped topological insulator (MTI) thin films and in bilayer graphene moir{é} superlattices. We classify Chern insulator ferromagnets as either spin or orbital, depending on whether the orbital magnetization results from spontaneous spin-polarization combined with spin-orbit interactions, as in the MTI case, or directly from spontaneous orbital currents, as in the moir{é} superlattice case. We argue that in a given magnetic state, characterized for …
We studied magneto-optical response of a canonical topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$ with the goal of addressing a controversial issue of electron-phonon coupling. Magnetic-field induced modifications of reflectance are very pronounced in the infrared part of the spectrum, indicating strong electron-phonon coupling. This coupling causes an asymmetric line-shape of the 60 cm$^{-1}$ phonon mode, and is analyzed within the Fano formalism. The analysis reveals that the Fano asymmetry parameter (q) changes sign when the cyclotron resonance is degenerate with the phonon mode. To the best of our kno…
Two-dimensional (2D) topological electronic insulators are known to give rise to gapless edge modes, which underlie low energy dynamics, including electrical and thermal transport. This has been thoroughly investigated in the context of quantum Hall phases, and time-reversal invariant topological insulators. Here we study the edge of a 2D, topologically trivial insulating phase, as a function of the strength of the electronic interactions and the steepness of the confining potential. For sufficiently smooth confining potentials, alternating compressible and incompressible stripes appear at the…
We prove that any forms of electric current measurements within a gapped or gapless quantum system necessarily violate the time reversal symmetry (TRS). We then use the ionization energy theory to unequivocally show that the metallic surface states of a topological insulator consist of some special energy level crossings, not due to TRS induced Kramers degeneracy because there is a finite energy gap due to different wavefunctions. We use this special crossings and derive the electron-ion scattering rate required to explain the resistivity and carrier-type transition in (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 and Pb1-x…
We study the time reversal (T) symmetry breaking of 2d helical fermi liquid, with application to the edge states of 3d topological band insulators with only one two-component Dirac fermion at finite chemical potential, as well as other systems with spin-orbit coupling. The T-breaking Ising order parameter is not over-damped and the theory is different from the ordinary Hertz-Millis theory for order parameters at zero momentum. We argue that the T-breaking phase transition is an 3d Ising transition, and the quasiparticles are well-defined in the quantum critical regime.
Anderson's localization on the edge of two dimensional time reversal (TR) topological insulator (TI) is studied. For the non-interacting case the topological protection acts accordingly to the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ classification, leading to conducting and insulating phases for odd and even fillings respectively. In the presence of repulsive interaction the phase diagram is notably changed. We show that for sufficiently strong values of the interaction the zero temperature fixed point of the TI is conducting, including the case of even fillings. We compute the boundaries of the conducting phase for v…
Moir{é} superlattice realized in two-dimensional heterostructures offers an exciting platform to access strongly-correlated electronic states. In this work, we study transition metal dichalcogenides (TMD) Moir{é} superlattices with time-reversal-symmetry and nontrivial spin{/valley}-Chern numbers. Utilizing realistic material parameters and the method of exact diagonalization, we find that at a certain twisting angle and fractional filling, gapped fractional topological states, i.e., fractional Chern insulators, are naturally {stabilized} by simply introducing the Coulomb repulsion. In contras…
A time-reversal invariant topological insulator can be generally defined by the effective topological field theory with a quantized θcoefficient, which can only take values of 0 or π. This theory is generally valid for an arbitrarily interacting system and the quantization of the θinvariant can be directly measured experimentally. Reduced to the case of a non-interacting system, the θinvariant can be expressed as an integral over the entire three dimensional Brillouin zone. Alternatively, non-interacting insulators can be classified by topological invariants defined over discrete time-reversal…
We study the phase diagram of a model quantum spin Hall system as a function of band inversion and band-coupling strength, demonstrating that when band hybridization is weak, an interaction-induced nematic insulator state emerges over a wide range of band inversion. This property is a consequence of the long-range Coulomb interaction, which favors interband phase coherence that is weakly dependent on momentum and therefore frustrated by the single-particle Hamiltonian at the band inversion point. For weak band hybridization, interactions convert the continuous gap closing topological phase tra…
We propose a $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ classification of Abelian time-reversal fractional topological insulators in terms of the composite fermions picture. We consider the standard toy model where spin up and down electrons are subjected to opposite magnetic fields and only electrons of the same spin interact via a repulsive force. By applying the composite fermions approach to this time-reversal symmetric system, we are able to obtain a hierarchy of topological insulators with spin Hall conductance $σ_{s}=\frac{e}{2π}\frac{p}{2mp+1} $, being $p,m \in\mathbb{N}$. They show stable edge states only for …
We generalize the Pfaffian formalism, which has been playing an important role in the study of time-reversal invariant topological insulators (TIs), to 3D chiral higher-order topological insulators (HOTIs) protected by the product of four-fold rotational symmetry $C_4$ and the time-reversal symmetry $T$. This Pfaffian description reveals a deep and fundamental link between TIs and HOTIs, and allows important conclusions about TIs to be generalized to HOTIs. As examples, we demonstrate in the Letter how to generalize Fu-Kane's parity criterion for TIs to HOTIs, and also present a general method…
When time reversal symmetry is present there is a sharp distinction between topological and trivial band insulators which ensures that, as parameters are varied, these phases are separated by a phase transition at which the bulk gap closes. Surprisingly we find that even in the absence of time reversal symmetry, gapless regions originating from the phase boundaries persist. Moreover the critical line generically opens up to enclose Chern insulating phases that are thin but of finite extent in the phase diagram. We explain the topological origin of this effect in terms of quantized charge pumpi…
We numerically evaluate the entanglement spectrum (singular value decomposition of the wavefunction) of paired states of fermions in two dimensions that break parity and time-reversal symmetries, focusing on the spin-polarized $p_x+ip_y$ case. The entanglement spectrum of the weak-pairing (BCS) phase contains a Majorana zero mode, indicating non-Abelian topological order. In contrast, for the strong-pairing (BEC) phase, we find no such mode, consistent with Abelian topological order.
In this manuscript, we study the interplay between symmetry and topology with a focus on the $Z_2$ topological index of 2D/3D topological insulators and high-order topological insulators. We show that in the presence of either a two-fold-rotational symmetry or a mirror symmetry, a gauge-invariant quantity can be defined for arbitrary 1D lines in the Brillouin zone. Such 1D quantities provide a new pathway to compute the $Z_2$ index of topological insulators. In contrast to the generic setup, where the $Z_2$ index generally involves 2D planes in the Brillouin zone with a globally-defined smooth…
A fundamental open problem in condensed matter physics is how the dichotomy between conventional and topological band insulators is modified in the presence of strong electron interactions. We show that there are 6 new electronic topological insulators that have no non-interacting counterpart. Combined with the previously known band-insulators, these produce a total of 8 topologically distinct phases. Two of the new topological insulators have a simple physical description as Mott insulators in which the electron spins form spin analogs of the familiar topological band-insulator. The remaining…
The search for quantum spin liquids in frustrated quantum magnets recently has enjoyed a surge of interest, with various candidate materials under intense scrutiny. However, an experimental confirmation of a gapped topological spin liquid remains an open question. Here, we show that circularly-polarized light can provide a novel knob to drive frustrated Mott insulators into a chiral spin liquid (CSL), realizing an elusive quantum spin liquid with topological order. We find that the dynamics of a driven Kagome Mott insulator is well-captured by an effective Floquet spin model, with heating stro…
The system of spinless fermions on a hexagonal lattice is studied . We have considered tight-binding model with the hopping integrals between the nearest-neighbor and next-nearest-neighbor lattice sites, that depend on the direction of the link. The links are divided on three types depending on the direction, the hopping integrals are defined by different phases along the links. The energy of the system depends on the phase differences, the solutions for the phases, that correspond to the minimums of the energy, lead to a topological insulator state with the nontrivial Chern numbers. We have a…
Inspired by a recently constructed commuting-projector Hamiltonian for a two-dimensional (2D) time-reversal-invariant topological superconductor [Wang et al., Phys. Rev. B 98, 094502 (2018)], we introduce a commuting-projector model that describes an interacting yet exactly solvable 2D topological insulator. We explicitly show that both the gapped and gapless boundaries of our model are consistent with those of band-theoretic, weakly interacting topological insulators. Interestingly, on certain lattices our time-reversal-symmetric models also enjoy $\mathcal{CP}$ symmetry, leading to intuitive…
Three-dimensional topological (crystalline) insulators are materials with an insulating bulk, but conducting surface states which are topologically protected by time-reversal (or spatial) symmetries. Here, we extend the notion of three-dimensional topological insulators to systems that host no gapless surface states, but exhibit topologically protected gapless hinge states. Their topological character is protected by spatio-temporal symmetries, of which we present two cases: (1) Chiral higher-order topological insulators protected by the combination of time-reversal and a four-fold rotation sy…
The emergence of superconductivity in doped Mott insulators has been debated for decades. In this paper, we report the theoretical discovery of a time-reversal symmetry breaking superconducting ground state in the doped Mott insulator (described by the well known t-J model) on honeycomb lattice, based on a recently developed variational method: the Grassmann tensor product state approach. As a benchmark, we use exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization methods to check our results on small clusters. We find systematic consistency for the ground-state energy as well as other phys…
We present a series of models of three-dimensional rotation-symmetric fragile topological insulators in class AI (time-reversal symmetric and spin-orbit-free systems), which have gapless surface states protected by time-reversal ($T$) and $n$-fold rotation ($C_n$) symmetries ($n=2,4,6$). Our models are generalizations of Fu's model of a spinless topological crystalline insulator, in which orbital degrees of freedom play the role of pseudo-spins. We consider minimal surface Hamiltonian with $C_n$ symmetry in class AI and discuss possible symmetry-protected gapless surface states, i.e., a quadra…
Topological insulators are characterized by the presence of gapless surface modes protected by time-reversal symmetry. In three space dimensions the magnetoelectric response is described in terms of a bulk theta term for the electromagnetic field. Here we construct theoretical examples of such phases that cannot be smoothly connected to any band insulator. Such correlated topological insulators admit the possibility of fractional magnetoelectric response described by fractional theta/pi. We show that fractional theta/pi is only possible in a gapped time reversal invariant system of bosons or f…
The precise determination of critical point is the basis to extract various critical properties of phase transitions. We identify that for two-dimensional inversion asymmetric insulators, with and without time-reversal symmetry, when topological phase transitions take place, all nonvanishing components of band-edge shift current tensor will reverse their signs in a singular way, regardless of what realistic value the temperature takes. This remarkable sign-reversal behavior of band-edge shift current tensor thus can be applied to determine the critical points of various topological phase trans…
We study the Hubbard model with time-reversal invariant flux and spin-orbit coupling and position-dependent onsite energies on the kagome lattice, using numerical and analytical methods. In particular, we perform calculations using real space dynamical mean-field theory (R-DMFT). To study the topological properties of the system, we use the topological Hamiltonian approach. We obtain a rich phase diagram: for weak and intermediate interactions, depending on the model parameters, the system is in the band insulator, topological insulator, or metallic phase, while for strong interactions the sys…
A second-order topological insulator in $d$ dimensions is an insulator which has no $d-1$ dimensional topological boundary states but has $d-2$ dimensional topological boundary states. It is an extended notion of the conventional topological insulator. Higher-order topological insulators have been investigated in square and cubic lattices. In this paper, we generalize them to breathing Kagome and pyrochlore lattices. First, we construct a second-order topological insulator on the breathing Kagome lattice. Three topological boundary states emerge at the corner of the triangle, realizing a 1/3 f…
Gapless surface states that are protected by time reversal symmetry and charge conservation are among the manifestations of 3D topological insulators. In this work we study how electron-electron interaction may lead to spontaneous breaking of time reversal symmetry on surfaces of such insulators. We find that a critical interaction strength exists, above which the surface is unstable to spontaneous formation of magnetization, and study the dependence of this critical interaction strength on temperature and chemical potential.
We propose a simple microscopic model to numerically investigate the stability of a two dimensional fractional topological insulator (FTI). The simplest example of a FTI consists of two decoupled copies of a Laughlin state with opposite chiralities. We focus on bosons at half filling. We study the stability of the FTI phase upon addition of two coupling terms of different nature: an interspin interaction term, and an inversion symmetry breaking term that couples the copies at the single particle level. Using exact diagonalization and entanglement spectra, we numerically show that the FTI phase…
We propose a topological order parameter for interacting topological insulators, expressed in terms of the full Green's functions of the interacting system. We show that it is exactly quantized for a time reversal invariant topological insulator, and it can be experimentally measured through the topological magneto-electric effect. This topological order parameter can be applied to both interacting and disordered systems, and used for determining their phase diagrams.
The surface of a 3D topological insulator is a new type of two dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The exactly quantized magneto-optical or axionic response of a 3D topological insulator is a direct result of the Berry's phase protected spin-momentum locked states on its surface. (PRL Viewpoint http://physics.aps.org/node/3810).
A 3d electron topological insulator (ETI) is a phase of matter protected by particle-number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. It was previously believed that the surface of an ETI must be gapless unless one of these symmetries is broken. A well-known symmetry-preserving, gapless surface termination of an ETI supports an odd number of Dirac cones. In this paper we deduce a symmetry-respecting, gapped surface termination of an ETI, which carries an intrinsic 2d topological order, Moore-Read x anti-semion. The Moore-Read sector supports non-Abelian charge 1/4 anyons, while the Abelian, ant…
Symmetry protected topological phase is one type of nontrivial quantum disordered many-body state of matter. In this work we study one class of symmetry protected topological phases in two dimensional space, with both PSU(N) and time reversal symmetry. These states can be described by a principal chiral model with a topological Theta-term. As long as the time-reversal symmetry and PSU(N) symmetry are both preserved, the 1+1 dimensional boundary of this system must be either gapless or degenerate. We will also construct a wave function of a spin-1 system on the honeycomb lattice, which is a can…
Chiral-antichiral pairs of non-Abelian Hall states, like the Pfaffian, Read-Rezayi and NASS states, can be used to model two-dimensional time-reversal invariant topological insulators. Their stability was shown to be associated to the presence of a Z_2 anomaly and characterized by the same Z_2 index introduced for free fermion and Abelian systems. In this work, we continue the stability analysis by providing the form of time-reversal invariant interactions that gap the non-Abelian edge excitations. Our approach is based on the description of non-Abelian states as projections of corresponding "…
We present a general framework for analyzing fractionalized, time reversal invariant electronic insulators in two dimensions. The framework applies to all insulators whose quasiparticles have abelian braiding statistics. First, we construct the most general Chern-Simons theories that can describe these states. We then derive a criterion for when these systems have protected gapless edge modes -- that is, edge modes that cannot be gapped out without breaking time reversal or charge conservation symmetry. The systems with protected edge modes can be regarded as fractionalized analogues of topolo…
We study possible quantum $U(1)$ spin liquids in three dimensions with time-reversal symmetry. We find a total of 7 families of such $U(1)$ spin liquids, distinguished by the properties of their emergent electric/magnetic charges. We show how these spin liquids are related to each other. Two of these classes admit nontrivial protected surface states which we describe. We show how to access all of the 7 spin liquids through slave particle (parton) constructions. We also provide intuitive loop gas descriptions of their ground state wave functions. One of these phases is the `topological Mott ins…
We consider two-dimensional Chern insulators and time-reversal invariant topological insulators and discuss the effect of perturbations breaking either particle-number conservation or time-reversal symmetry. The appearance of trivial mass terms is expected to cause quantum phase transitions into trivial phases when such a perturbation overweights the topological term. These phase transitions are usually associated with a bulk-gap closing. In contrast, the chiral Chern insulator is unaffected by particle-number breaking perturbations. Moreover, the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological insulator undergoes…
Intrinsic and symmetry protected topological states have attracted lots of interest in condensed matter physics recently. In particular, time reversal symmetry protected fermion topological insulators have been theoretically predicted and experimentally verified. However despite considerable experimental and theoretical works, definitive evidence for time reversal invariant topological superconductivity is still lacking. Here we propose that upon electron doping the hydrogenated single bilayer Bi, namely BiH, will exhibit time reversal invariant topological superconductivity. If confirmed expe…
We describe a method to find the anomaly of the time-reversal symmetry of 2+1d topological quantum field theories, by computing the fractional anomalous momentum on the cross-cap background. This allows us, for example, to identify the parameter $ν$ mod 16 of the bulk 3+1d topological superconductor with $\mathsf{T}^2=(-1)^F$ on whose boundary a given 2+1d time-reversal-invariant topological phase can appear.
We propose a $d-$dimensional interacting Majorana fermion model with quenched disorder, which gives us a continuous quantum phase transition between a diffusive thermal metal phase with a finite entropy density to an insulator phase with zero entropy density. This model is based on coupled Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev model clusters, and hence has a controlled large-$N$ limit. The metal-insulator transition is accompanied by a spontaneous time-reversal symmetry breaking. We perform controlled calculations to show that the diffusion constant jumps to zero discontinuously at the metal-insulator transition,…
We show that there exist two dimensional (2D) time reversal invariant fractionalized insulators with the property that both their boundary with the vacuum and their boundary with a topological insulator can be fully gapped without breaking time reversal or charge conservation symmetry. This result leads us to an apparent paradox: we consider a geometry in which a disk-like region made up of a topological insulator is surrounded by an annular strip of a fractionalized insulator, which is in turn surrounded by the vacuum. If we gap both boundaries of the strip, we naively obtain an example of a …
Topological insulators are new states of quantum matter with metallic edge/surface states. In this paper, we pointed out that there exists a new type of particle-hole symmetry-protected topological insulator - topological hierarchy insulator (THI), a composite topological state of a (parent) topological insulator and its defect-induced topological mid-gap states. A particular type of THI is topological fractal insulator, that is a THI with self-similar topological structure. In the end, we discuss the possible experimental realizations of THIs.
We investigate the effect of interactions in the Topological Insulator in 3+1 dimensions. We show that for a particular type of interactions, the Electrodynamics response is equivalent to the response of non-interacting Topological Insulator in 4+1 dimensions.
In this paper, we study the magnetic orders of two dimensional correlated topological insulators including the correlated Chern insulator and the correlated Z2 topological insulator at finite temperature. For the 2D correlated Chern insulator, we found that thermal-fluctuation-induced magnetic order appears in the intermediate interaction region of the correlated Chern insulator. On the contrary, for the correlated Z2 topological insulator there doesn't exist the thermal-fluctuation-induced magnetic order. In the end, we give an explanation on the difference.
We introduce a web of strongly correlated interacting 3+1D topological superconductors/insulators of 10 particular global symmetry groups of Cartan classes, realizable in electronic condensed matter systems, and their new SU(N) generalizations. The symmetries include SU(N), SU(2), U(1), fermion parity, time reversal and relate to each other through symmetry embeddings. We overview the lattice Hamiltonian formalism. We complete the list of field theories of bulk symmetry-protected topological invariants (SPT invariants/partition functions that exhibit boundary 't Hooft anomalies) via cobordism …
We propose an exactly solvable quantum spin-1/2 model with time reversal invariance on a two dimensional brick-wall lattice, where each unit cell consists of three sites. We find that the ground states are algebraic quantum spin liquid states. The spinon excitations are gapless and the energy dispersion is linear around two Dirac points. The ground states are of three-fold topological degeneracy on a torus. Breaking the time reversal symmetry opens a bulk energy gap and the $Z_2$ vortices obey non-Abelian statistics.
We propose general topological order parameters for interacting insulators in terms of the Green's function at zero frequency. They provide an unified description of various interacting topological insulators including the quantum anomalous Hall insulators and the time reversal invariant insulators in four, three and two dimensions. Since only Green's function at zero frequency is used, these topological order parameters can be evaluated efficiently by most numerical and analytical algorithms for strongly interacting systems.
We show how quantum oscillation measurements of surface states in an insulator may allow to diagnose a strong topological insulator and distinguish it from its weak or topologically trivial counterpart. The criterion is defined by the parity of the number of fundamental frequencies in the surface-state quantum oscillation spectrum: an even number of frequencies implies a weak or a topologically trivial insulator, whereas an odd number points to a strong topological insulator. We also discuss various aspects and issues related to applying this criterion in practice.
For interacting Z_2 topological insulators with inversion symmetry, we propose a simple topological invariant expressed in terms of the parity eigenvalues of the interacting Green's function at time-reversal invariant momenta. We derive this result from our previous formula involving the integral over the frequency-momenta space. This formula greatly simplifies the explicit calculation of Z_2 topological invariants in inversion symmetric insulators with strong interactions.
We present a theory on the quantum phase diagram of AB-stacked MoTe$_2$/WSe$_2$ using a self-consistent Hartree-Fock calculation performed in the plane-wave basis, motivated by the observation of topological states in this system. At filling factor $ν=2$ (two holes per moiré unit cell), Coulomb interaction can stabilize a $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological insulator by opening a charge gap. At $ν=1$, the interaction induces three classes of competing states, spin density wave states, an in-plane ferromagnetic state, and a valley polarized state, which undergo first-order phase transitions tuned by an …
Some time-reversal symmetric topological orders are anomalous in that they cannot be realized in strictly two-dimensions without breaking time reversal symmetry; instead, they can only be realized on the surface of certain three-dimensional systems. We propose two quantities, which we call {\it anomaly indicators}, that can detect if a time-reversal symmetric topological order is anomalous in this sense. Both anomaly indicators are expressed in terms of the quantum dimensions, topological spins, and time-reversal properties of the anyons in the given topological order. The first indicator, $η_…
We consider the time-reversal-invariant Hofstadter-Hubbard model which can be realized in cold atom experiments. In these experiments, an additional staggered potential and an artificial Rashba--type spin-orbit coupling are available. Without interactions, the system exhibits various phases such as topological and normal insulator, metal as well as semi--metal phases with two or even more Dirac cones. Using a combination of real-space dynamical mean-field theory and analytical techniques, we discuss the effect of on-site interactions and determine the corresponding phase diagram. In particular…
A general technique to analyze the classical interaction between ideal topological insulators, and electromagnetic sources and fields, has been previously elaborated. Nevertheless it is not immediately applicable in the laboratory as it fails to describe real ponderable media. In this work we provide a description of real topologically insulating materials taking into account their dielectric and magnetic properties. For inhomogeneous permittivity and permeability, the problem of finding the Green's function must be solved in an ad hoc manner. Nevertheless, the physically feasible cases of pie…
The ground state of translationally-invariant insulators comprise bands which can assume topologically distinct structures. There are few known examples where this distinction is enforced by a point-group symmetry alone. In this paper we show that 1D and 2D insulators with the simplest point-group symmetry - inversion - have a $Z^{\geq}$ classification. In 2D, we identify a relative winding number that is solely protected by inversion symmetry. By analysis of Berry phases, we show that this invariant has similarities with the first Chern class (of time-reversal breaking insulators), but is mor…
