Parafermionic wires at the interface of chiral topological states

Abstract

We explore a scenario where local interactions form one-dimensional gapped interfaces between a pair of distinct chiral two-dimensional topological states - referred to as phases 1 and 2 - such that each gapped region terminates at a domain wall separating the chiral gapless edge states of these phases. We show that this type of T-junction supports point-like fractionalized excitations obeying parafermion statistics, thus implying that the one-dimensional gapped interface forms an effective topological parafermionic wire possessing a non-trivial ground state degeneracy. The physical properties of the anyon condensate that gives rise to the gapped interface are investigated. Remarkably, this condensate causes the gapped interface to behave as a type of anyon "Andreev reflector" in the bulk, whereby anyons from one phase, upon hitting the interface, can be transformed into a combination of reflected anyons and outgoing anyons from the other phase. Thus, we conclude that while different topological orders can be connected via gapped interfaces, the interfaces are themselves topological.

To appear in Physical Review Letters. 5 pages plus Supplementary Material. Minor improvements in the presentation and references added

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Cited by in corpus (22)

• Anyon condensation and its applications
• Z4 parafermions in one-dimensional fermionic lattices
• Topological phases of parafermions: a model with exactly-solvable ground states
• Coupled-wire constructions: a Luttinger liquid approach to topology
• Anyonic tight-binding models of parafermions and of fractionalized fermions
• Multipartitioning topological phases by vertex states and quantum entanglement
• Symmetry-Protected Topological Interfaces and Entanglement Sequences
• Non-topological parafermions in a one-dimensional fermionic model with even multiplet pairing
• Parafermionization, bosonization, and critical parafermionic theories
• Entanglement Entropy of Generalized Moore-Read Fractional Quantum Hall State Interfaces
• Majorana zero modes and their bosonization
• Parafermions in a multilegged geometry: Towards a scalable parafermionic network
• Families of Gapped Interfaces Between Fractional Quantum Hall States
• Model wavefunctions for interfaces between lattice Laughlin states
• Parafermions in Hierarchical Fractional Quantum Hall States
• Dynamical topological excitations in parafermion chains
• Model wavefunctions for an interface between lattice Laughlin and Moore-Read states
• Edge ${\mathbb{Z}}_3$ parafermions in fermionic lattices
• Overlap of parafermionic zero modes at a finite distance
• Bipartite Fidelity and Loschmidt Echo of Bosonic Conformal Interface
• Phases of Quasi-One-Dimensional Fractional Quantum (Anomalous) Hall - Superconductor Heterostructures
• Theory of Hofstadter Superconductors