Dyon condensation in topological Mott insulators

Abstract

We consider quantum phase transitions out of topological Mott insulators in which the ground state of the fractionalized excitations (fermionic spinons) is topologically non-trivial. The spinons in topological Mott insulators are coupled to an emergent compact U(1) gauge field with a so-called "axion" term. We study the confinement transitions from the topological Mott insulator to broken symmetry phases, which may occur via the condensation of dyons. Dyons carry both "electric" and "magnetic" charges, and arise naturally in this system because the monopoles of the emergent U(1) gauge theory acquires gauge charge due to the axion term. It is shown that the dyon condensate, in general, induces simultaneous current and bond orders. To demonstrate this, we study the confined phase of the topological Mott insulator on the cubic lattice. When the magnetic transition is driven by dyon condensation, we identify the bond order as valence bond solid order and the current order as scalar spin chirality order. Hence, the confined phase of the topological Mott insulator is an exotic phase where the scalar spin chirality and the valence bond order coexist and appear via a single transition. We discuss implications of our results for generic models of topological Mott insulators.

14 pages, accepted to the New Journal of Physics

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Cited by in corpus (10)

• Classification of interacting electronic topological insulators in three dimensions
• Fractional Topological Insulators -- a Pedagogical Review
• Constructing symmetric topological phases of bosons in three dimensions via fermionic projective construction and dyon condensation
• Topological order in a correlated three-dimensional topological insulator
• Three dimensional Symmetry Protected Topological Phase close to Antiferromagnetic Neel order
• Topological magnetic excitations
• Dimensional crossover and cold-atom realization of topological Mott insulators
• Condensation of Lattice Defects and Melting Transitions in Quantum Hall phases
• Monte Carlo Study of a $U(1)\times U(1)$ Loop Model with Modular Invariance
• Dynamical Axions in $U(1)$ Quantum Spin Liquids