Title: Kitaev’s 16-fold way: microscopic Hamiltonians and model wave functions

Speaker: Prof. Hong-Hao Tu (TU Dresden)
Time: August 30 (Wednesday), 10:00
Place: Rm M830, IOP-CAS

Abstract: 
In two dimensions, the topological order described by Z_2 gauge theory coupled to free or weakly interacting fermions with a nonzero spectral Chern number C is classified by C mod 16 as predicted by Kitaev (known as “Kitaev’s 16-fold way”).  In this talk I will present two complementary approaches for better understanding Kitaev’s 16-fold way and its possible realizations: (i) We generalize Kitaev’s honeycomb model to a family of Gamma-matrix models, providing a systematic and complete microscopic construction for Kitaev’s 16-fold way. (ii) We propose a chiral conformal field theory approach for constructing model wave functions on the torus, which automatically generates anyon eigenbasis. Its application to Kitaev’s 16-fold way gives model wave functions which can be identified as C copies of p+ip pairing states under Gutzwiller projection.

Short bio: Hong-Hao Tu (TU Dresden) received his B.Sc degree from Wuhan University in 2003 and PhD degree from Tsinghua University in 2009, respectively. After postdoctoral stay at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics and Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich, he was appointed Junior Professor for Correlated Electrons and Topology at TU Dresden in 2017. His research interest is quantum many-body theory, including tensor networks, topological phases of matter, conformal field theory, and exactly solvable models.