Charge and spin fractionalization in strongly correlated topological insulators

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive topological field theory framework for strongly correlated two-dimensional quantum liquids with SU(2) symmetry, elucidating fractionalization phenomena in fractional topological insulators with time-reversal symmetry.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized SU(2) topological Landau-Ginzburg theory that extends existing gauge theories to describe fractionalization in strongly correlated topological insulators.

Findings

Generalized gauge theories for SU(2) quantum liquids

Description of fractionalization of quantum numbers and statistics

Application to fractional topological insulators with time-reversal symmetry

Abstract

We construct an effective topological Landau-Ginzburg theory that describes general SU(2) incompressible quantum liquids of strongly correlated particles in two spatial dimensions. This theory characterizes the fractionalization of quasiparticle quantum numbers and statistics in relation to the topological ground-state symmetries, and generalizes the Chern-Simons, BF and hierarchical effective gauge theories to an arbitrary representation of the SU(2) symmetry group. Our main focus are fractional topological insulators with time-reversal symmetry, which are treated as generalizations of the SU(2) quantum Hall effect.