Fractional topology in interacting one-dimensional superconductors

Frederick del Pozo, Loïc Herviou, and Karyn Le Hur

Phys. Rev. B 107, 155134 – Published 21 April 2023

Abstract

We investigate the topological phases of two one-dimensional (1D) interacting superconducting wires and propose topological markers directly measurable from ground-state correlation functions. These quantities remain powerful tools in the presence of couplings and interactions. We show with the density matrix renormalization group that the double critical Ising (DCI) phase of two interacting Kitaev chains is a fractional topological phase with gapless Majorana modes in the bulk, and a one-half topological invariant per wire. Using both numerics and quantum field theoretical methods, we show that the phase diagram remains stable in the presence of an interwire hopping amplitude $t_{⊥}$ at length scales below $\sim 1 / t_{⊥}$ . A large interwire hopping amplitude results in the emergence of two integer topological phases, stable also at large interactions. They host one edge mode per boundary shared between both wires. At large interactions, the two wires are described by Mott physics, with the $t_{⊥}$ hopping amplitude resulting in a paramagnetic order.