Origin of Topological Order in a Cooper Pair Insulator

Abstract

We unveil the microscopic origin of the topologically ordered counterpart of the s-wave superconductor in this work. For this, we employ the recently developed unitary renormalisation group (URG) method on a generalised model of 2D electrons attractive interactions. The effective Hamiltonian obtained at the stable low-energy fixed point of the RG flow corresponds to a gapped, insulating state of quantum matter we call the Cooper pair insulator (CPI). We show that the CPI ground state manifold displays several signatures of topological order, including a four-fold degeneracy when placed on the torus. Spectral flow arguments reveal the emergent gauge-theoretic structure of the effective Hamiltonian, as it can be written entirely in terms of non-local Wilson loops. It also contains a topological $\theta$-term whose coefficient is quantised, in keeping with the requirement of invariance of the ground state under large gauge transformations. We find that the long-ranged many-particle entanglement content of the CPI ground state is driven by inter-helicity two-particle scattering processes. Analysis of the passage from CPI to BCS superconducting ground state shows the RG flow promotes fluctuations in the number of condensed Cooper pairs and lowers those in the conjugate global phase. Consequently, the distinct signatures of long-ranged entanglement in the CPI are replaced by the well-known short-ranged entanglement of the BCS state. Finally, we study the renormalisation of the entanglement in $k$-space for both the CPI and BCS ground states. The topologically ordered CPI state is shown to possess an emergent hierarchy of scales of entanglement, and that this hierarchy collapses in the BCS state. Our work offers clear evidence for the microscopic origins of topological order in this prototypical system, and lays the foundation for similar investigations in other systems of correlated electrons.

arXiv comment25 pages, 25 figures, 82 references; new references and corrections added

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• Unveiling the Kondo cloud: unitary RG study of the Kondo model
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