English

Equivalent topological invariants of topological insulators

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2012-09-25 v2 Mesoscale and Nanoscale Physics

Abstract

A time-reversal invariant topological insulator can be generally defined by the effective topological field theory with a quantized \theta coefficient, which can only take values of 0 or \pi. This theory is generally valid for an arbitrarily interacting system and the quantization of the \theta invariant can be directly measured experimentally. Reduced to the case of a non-interacting system, the \theta invariant 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 invariant momenta. In this paper, we show the complete equivalence between the integral and the discrete invariants of the topological insulator.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0910.5954,
  title  = {Equivalent topological invariants of topological insulators},
  author = {Zhong Wang and Xiao-Liang Qi and Shou-Cheng Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.5954},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

Published version. Typos corrected