Interaction-mediated surface state instability in disordered three-dimensional topological superconductors with spin SU(2) symmetry

Abstract

We show that arbitrarily weak interparticle interactions destabilize the surface states of 3D topological superconductors with spin SU(2) invariance (symmetry class CI), in the presence of non-magnetic disorder. The conduit for the instability is disorder-induced wavefunction multifractality. We argue that time-reversal symmetry breaks spontaneously at the surface, so that topologically-protected states do not exist for this class. The interaction-stabilized surface phase is expected to exhibit ferromagnetic order, or to reside in an insulating plateau of the spin quantum Hall effect.

v2: 5+3 pages, 1 figure; expanded introduction, added background on topological superconductors and multifractality, technical details relegated to sup info (published version)

References in corpus (9)

• Classification of topological insulators and superconductors in three spatial dimensions
• Anderson Transitions
• Topological delocalization of two-dimensional massless Dirac fermions
• Eigenfunction fractality and pseudogap state near superconductor-insulator transition
• Quantum criticality and minimal conductivity in graphene with long-range disorder
• Z2 topological term, the global anomaly, and the two-dimensional symplectic symmetry class of Anderson localization
• Lattice model of three-dimensional topological singlet superconductor with time-reversal symmetry
• Multifractal nature of the surface local density of states in three-dimensional topological insulators with magnetic and nonmagnetic disorder
• Disordered d-wave superconductors with interactions

Cited by in corpus (43)

• Classification of topological quantum matter with symmetries
• Observation of tunable mobility edges in generalized Aubry-André lattices
• Symmetry Protected Topological Superfluids and Superconductors --- From the Basics to ${}^3$He ---
• Second-order Dirac superconductors and magnetic field induced Majorana hinge modes
• Statistics of eigenstates near the localization transition on random regular graphs
• Non-perturbative methodologies for low-dimensional strongly-correlated systems: From non-abelian bosonization to truncated spectrum methods
• Topological superconductivity of spin-3/2 carriers in a three-dimensional doped Luttinger semimetal
• Topological protection, disorder, and interactions: Survival at the surface of 3D topological superconductors
• Superconductivity of disordered Dirac fermions
• Multifractality at Anderson transitions with Coulomb interaction
• Magic angles and correlations in twisted nodal superconductors
• Magic-Angle Semimetals with Chiral Symmetry
• Superconductivity of disordered Dirac fermions in graphene
• Chalker scaling, level repulsion, and conformal invariance in critically delocalized quantum matter: Disordered topological superconductors and artificial graphene
• Disorder-enhanced topological protection and universal quantum criticality in a spin-3/2 topological superconductor
• Response theory of the ergodic many-body delocalized phase: Keldysh Finkel'stein sigma models and the 10-fold way
• Interaction and disorder effects in 3D topological insulator thin films
• Multifractally-enhanced superconductivity in thin films
• Multifractality and electron-electron interaction at Anderson transitions
• Surface transport coefficients for three-dimensional topological superconductors
• Disordered fermionic quantum critical points
• Disorder and interaction in chiral chains: Majoranas vs complex fermions
• Criticality Across the Energy Spectrum from Random, Artificial Gravitational Lensing in Two-Dimensional Dirac Superconductors
• Quantum Interference of Hydrodynamic Modes in a Dirty Marginal Fermi Liquid
• Enhanced Amplitude for Superconductivity due to Spectrum-wide Wave Function Criticality in Quasiperiodic and Power-law Random Hopping Models
• Critical Percolation Without Fine Tuning on the Surface of a Topological Superconductor
• Spontaneous gap generation on the surface of weakly interacting topological insulators using nonmagnetic impurities
• Mesoscopic fluctuations of the single-particle Green's function at Anderson transitions with Coulomb interaction
• Anomalous localization at the boundary of an interacting topological insulator
• Generalized multifractality at spin quantum Hall transition
• Order-from-disorder and critical scalings of spontaneous magnetization in random-field quantum spin systems
• Localized surfaces of three dimensional topological insulators
• Towards a Comprehensive Theory of Metal-Insulator Transitions in Doped Semiconductors
• Generalized multifractality in the spin quantum Hall symmetry class with interaction
• Generalized surface multifractality in 2D disordered systems
• Enhancement of Superconductivity in a Dirty Marginal Fermi Liquid
• Chiral anomaly without Landau levels: From the quantum to the classical regime
• Marginally localized edges of time-reversal symmetric topological superconductors
• Mesoscopic fluctuations of the local density of states in interacting electron systems
• Boundary multifractality in the spin quantum Hall symmetry class with interaction
• How spectrum-wide quantum criticality protects surface states of topological superconductors from Anderson localization: Quantum Hall plateau transitions (almost) all the way down
• Anomalous gapped boundaries between surface topological orders in higher-order topological insulators and superconductors with inversion symmetry
• Magnetic instability and spin-glass order beyond the Anderson-Mott transition in interacting power-law random banded matrix fermions