Thermal Instability of Protected End States in a 1-D Topological Insulator

TL;DR

This paper investigates how thermal effects from a noisy environment cause the decay of protected end states in a 1D topological insulator, revealing that symmetry preservation does not prevent instability.

Contribution

It demonstrates that thermal interactions can destabilize topological end states while maintaining their protecting symmetry, with practical implications for cold atom simulations.

Findings

End states decay over time due to thermal effects.

Chiral symmetry remains intact despite instability.

Lifetimes of end states are computed for experimental relevance.

Abstract

We have studied the dynamical thermal effects on the protected end states of a topological insula- tor (TI) when it is considered as an open quantum system in interaction with a noisy environment at a certain temperature T . As a result, we find that protected end states in a TI become unstable and decay with time. Very remarkably, the interaction with the thermal environment (fermion-boson) respects chiral symmetry, which is the symmetry responsible for the protection (robustness) of the end states in this TI when it is isolated from the environment. Therefore, this mechanism makes end states unstable while preserving their protecting symmetry. Our results have immediate practical implications in recently proposed simulations of TI using cold atoms in optical lattices. Accordingly, we have computed lifetimes of topological end states for these physical implementations that are useful to make those experiments realistic.