TOPOLOGICAL EFFECTIVE FIELD THEORIES FOR DIRAC FERMIONS FROM INDEX THEOREM

DOI10.1142/S0217979213501932zbMATH Open1284.81261arXiv1303.6468MaRDI QIDQ5407828FDOQ5407828

Roberto Catenacci, Giandomenico Palumbo, Annalisa Marzuoli

Publication date: 8 April 2014

Published in: International Journal of Modern Physics B (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: Dirac fermions have a central role in high energy physics but it is well known that they emerge also as quasiparticles in several condensed matter systems supporting topological order. We present a general method for deriving the topological effective actions of (3+1) massless Dirac fermions living on general backgrounds and coupled with vector and axial-vector gauge fields. The first step of our strategy is standard (in the Hermitian case) and consists in connecting the determinants of Dirac operators with the corresponding analytical indices through the zeta-function regularization. Then, we introduce a suitable splitting of the heat kernel that naturally selects the purely topological part of the determinant (i.e. the topological effective action). This topological effective action is expressed in terms of gauge fields using the Atiyah-Singer index theorem which computes the analytical index in topological terms. The main new result of this paper is to provide a consistent extension of this method to the non Hermitian case where a well-defined determinant does not exist. Quantum systems supporting relativistic fermions can thus be topologically classified on the basis of their response to the presence of (external or emergent) gauge fields through the corresponding topological effective field theories.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1303.6468

zbMATH Keywords

topological insulatorsDirac fermionseffective topological field theoryindex theorems in condensed matter systems

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Index theory and related fixed-point theorems on manifolds (58J20) Selfadjoint operator theory in quantum theory, including spectral analysis (81Q10) Nonselfadjoint operator theory in quantum theory including creation and destruction operators (81Q12) Yang-Mills and other gauge theories in quantum field theory (81T13) Quantum field theory on curved space or space-time backgrounds (81T20) Topological field theories in quantum mechanics (81T45)

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Cited In (3)

• Fermion mass generation and induced current in low-dimensional models with nontrivial topology
• Effective Lagrangian for non-abelian two-dimensional topological field theory
• Geometric model of topological insulators from the Maxwell algebra

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