Unifying topological phase transitions in non-interacting, interacting, and periodically driven systems

¹ Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zürich - 8093 Zurich, Switzerland
² Department of Physics, PUC-Rio - 22451-900 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Received: 11 October 2019
Accepted: 12 December 2019

Abstract

Topological phase transitions occur in real materials as well as quantum engineered systems, all of which differ greatly in terms of dimensionality, symmetries, interactions, and driving, and hence require a variety of techniques and concepts to describe their topological properties. For instance, topology may be accessed from single-particle Bloch wave functions, Green's functions, or many-body wave functions. We demonstrate that despite this diversity, all topological phase transitions display a universal feature: namely, a divergence of the curvature function that composes the topological invariant at the critical point. This feature can be exploited via a renormalization-group–like methodology to describe topological phase transitions. This approach serves to extend notions of correlation function, critical exponents, scaling laws and universality classes used in Landau theory to characterize topological phase transitions in a unified manner.