Local theory of the insulating state

TL;DR

This paper introduces a ground-state electron distribution-based localization marker that distinguishes insulators from metals and detects topological properties, applicable even in gapless and disordered systems.

Contribution

It develops a new localization marker derived from the ground state electron distribution, capable of identifying insulating versus metallic regions and topological distinctions.

Findings

The marker detects insulating vs. metallic character using only ground state data.

It distinguishes bulk insulators from conducting boundaries in topological systems.

Simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed localization marker.

Abstract

An insulator differs from a metal because of a different organization of the electrons in their ground state. In recent years this feature has been probed by means of a geometrical property: the quantum metric tensor, which addresses the system as a whole, and is therefore limited to macroscopically homogenous samples. Here we show that an analogous approach leads to a localization marker, which can detect the metallic vs. insulating character of a given sample region using as sole ingredient the ground state electron distribution, even in the Anderson case (where the spectrum is gapless). When applied to an insulator with nonzero Chern invariant, our marker is capable of discriminating the insulating nature of the bulk from the conducting nature of the boundary. Simulations (both model-Hamiltonian and first-principle) on several test cases validate our theory.