Condensed Matter

Monolayer WTe2, an inversion-symmetric transition metal dichalcogenide, has recently been established as a quantum spin Hall insulator and found superconducting upon gating. Here we show that generally a superconducting inversion-symmetric quantum spin Hall material whose normal state is ``effectively gapped", such as gated monolayer WTe2, can be an inversion-protected topological crystalline superconductor featuring ``higher-order topology" if the superconductivity is parity-odd. We explicitly demonstrate how the bulk-boundary correspondence naturally emerges in such type of superconductors within a two-dimensional minimal model. We then study the pairing symmetry of superconducting WTe2 with a microscopic model, and find two types of self-consistently obtained exotic pairings. First is an odd-parity pairing that possesses a nontrivial bulk symmetry indicator and hosts two Majorana Kramers pairs localizing at opposite corners. Even when the conventional pairing is energetically favored, we find that an intermediate in-plane field exceeding the Pauli limit stabilizes an equal-spin pairing aligning with the field. Our findings suggest gated monolayer WTe2 is a playground for exotic odd-parity superconductivity, and possibly the first material realization for inversion-protected Majorana corner modes without utilizing proximity effect. 

Topological crystalline states are short-range entangled states jointly protected by onsite and crystalline symmetries. While the non-interacting limit of these states, e.g., the topological crystalline insulators, have been intensively studied in band theory and have been experimentally discovered, the classification and diagnosis of their strongly interacting counterparts are relatively less well understood. Here we present a unified scheme for constructing all topological crystalline states, bosonic and fermionic, free and interacting, from real-space "building blocks" and "connectors". Building blocks are finite-size pieces of lower dimensional topological states protected by onsite symmetries alone, and connectors are "glue" that complete the open edges shared by two or multiple pieces of building blocks. The resulted assemblies are selected against two physical criteria we call the "no-open-edge condition" and the "bubble equivalence", which, respectively, ensure that each selected assembly is gapped in the bulk and cannot be deformed to a product state. The scheme is then applied to obtaining the full classification of bosonic topological crystalline states protected by several onsite symmetry groups and each of the 17 wallpaper groups in two dimensions and 230 space groups in three dimensions. We claim that our real-space recipes give the complete set of topological crystalline states for bosons and fermions, and prove the boson case analytically using a spectral sequence expansion of group cohomology.

We present a paradigm for effective descriptions of quantum magnets. Typically, a magnet has many classical ground states — configurations of spins (as classical vectors) that have the least energy. The set of all such ground states forms an abstract space. Remarkably, the low energy physics of the quantum magnet maps to that of a single particle moving in this space.

This presents an elegant route to simulate simple quantum mechanical models using molecular magnets. For instance, a dimer coupled by an XY bond maps to a particle moving on a ring. An XY triangular magnet maps to a particle moving on two disjoint rings. We can even simulate Berry phases; when the spin has half-integer values, the particle sees a pi-flux  threaded through the rings.

A particularly interesting example is the XY tetrahedral magnet. Here, the ground state space is a 'non-manifold' due to singularities. These singularities behave like strong impurities to create bound states. The entire low energy physics of the magnet is dominated by these bound states. We call this phenomenon 'order by singularity’. This leads to a preference for certain classical ground states purely due to topology, rather than due to thermal or quantum fluctuations. Unlike order-by-disorder, this effect persists even in the classical limit.

The Wilson formulation of lattice gauge theories provides a first-principles study of many properties of strongly interacting theories, such as quantum chromodynamics (QCD). Certain other properties, such as real-time dynamics, pose insurmountable challenges in this paradigm. Quantum Link Models are generalized lattice gauge theories, which not only offer novel approaches to study dynamics of gauge theories with quantum simulators, but also connect to
gauge theory descriptions of certain condensed matter systems (such as frustrated magnetism). In this talk, we explore some novel properties of gauge theories using quantum link models on classical computers, and explain how to realize them on quantum simulators.