Related papers: Fractionally charged extended objects and supersel…
Topological objects resulting from symmetry breakdown may be either stable or metastable depending on the pattern of symmetry breaking. However, if they acquire zero-energy modes of fermions, and in the process acquire non-integer fermionic…
I present two interesting studies related to the role of solitons in theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. Quantised fermions coupled to solitons are known to induce fractional fermion number. I present an example where an unstable…
Despite fermion doubling, a two-dimensional quasi-relativistic spin-1/2 system can still lead to true fractionalization of electrical charge, when a massive ordered phase supports a "half-vortex". Such topological defect is possible when…
Physics of topological materials have attracted much attention from both physicists and mathematicians recently. The index and the fermion number of Dirac fermions play an important role in topological insulators and topological…
We study a two-dimensional system of spin-polarized fermions on the kagome lattice at filling fraction f=1/3 interacting through a nearest-neighbor interaction V. Above a critical interaction strength V_c a charge-density wave with a broken…
We study the zero energy modes that arise in an unusual vortex configuration involving both the kinetic energy and an appropriate mass term in a model which exhibits birefringent Dirac fermions as its low energy excitations. We find the…
We consider a toroidal configuration of cosmic string in 3+1 dimensions in an abelian Higgs model, a compactification of the Nielsen-Olesen string. This object is classically unstable. We explicitly compute the number of permitted zero…
The fermion-doubling problem can be an obstacle to getting half-a-qubit in two-dimensional fermionic tight-binding models in the form of Majorana zero modes bound to the core of superconducting vortices. We argue that the number of such…
Noninteracting fermions, placed in a system with a continuous density of states, may have zeros in the $N$-fermion canonical partition function on the positive real $\beta$ axis (or very close to it), even for a small number of particles.…
High-density fermion matter is meta-stable due to the anomalous non-conservation of baryon and lepton numbers in the electroweak theory. The meta-stable state decays by penetrating the sphaleron barrier separating topologically different…
In several self-coupled quantum field theories when treated in semi-classical limit one obtains solitonic solutions determined by topology of the boundary conditions. Such solutions, e.g. magnetic monopole in unified theories…
The spectrum of massless Dirac electrons on the side surface of a three-dimensional weak topological insulator is significantly affected by whether the number of unit atomic layers constituting the sample is even or odd; it has a…
We report on numerical study of the Dirac fermions in partially filled N=3 Landau level (LL) in graphene. At half-filling, the equal-time density-density correlation function displays sharp peaks at nonzero wavevectors $\pm {\bf q^{*}}$.…
Majorana bound states are interesting candidates for applications in topological quantum computation. Low energy models allowing to grasp their properties are hence conceptually important. The usual scenario in these models is that two…
We study a chain of ferromagnetic nano-particles or ferromagnetic molecule/atoms on a substrate of fully gapped superconductors. We find that under quite realistic conditions, the fermion-number-parity symmetry $Z_2^f$ can spontaneously…
Electron fractionalization is intimately related to topology. In one-dimensional systems, fractionally charged states exist at domain walls between degenerate vacua. In two-dimensional systems, fractionalization exists in quantum Hall…
Grand unified theories can admit cosmic strings with fermion zero modes which result in the string carrying a current and the formation of stable remnants, vortons. We consider theories in which the zero modes do not survive a subsequent…
Grand unified theories can admit cosmic strings with fermion zero modes. Such zero modes result in the string being current-carrying and the formation of stable remnants, vortons. However, the string zero modes do not automaticall survive…
Candidate homogeneous, isotropic superfluid or superconducting states of paired fermion species with different chemical potentials, can lead to quasiparticle excitation energies that vanish at either zero, one, or two spheres in momentum…
In presence of string solitons, index theorems for the generalised Dirac operators have to be revisited. We show that in supersymmetric configurations the fermionic operators decouple, so that there are no mixing effects between different…