Fate of higher-order topological insulator under Coulomb interaction

TL;DR

This paper investigates how long-range Coulomb interactions and disorder affect three-dimensional second-order topological insulators, revealing their instability under Coulomb interactions and robustness against weak disorder through renormalization group analysis.

Contribution

It provides a detailed renormalization group analysis correcting previous unreliable conclusions about the stability of second-order TIs under Coulomb interactions and disorder.

Findings

Second-order TI is unstable to trivial band insulator under both strong and weak Coulomb interactions.

Weak disorder does not qualitatively modify the second-order TI, indicating robustness.

The sign of the mass parameter m can change depending on Coulomb strength, affecting phase stability.

Abstract

In this article, we study the influence of long-range Coulomb interaction on three-dimensional second-order topological insulator (TI) by renormalization group theory. We find that both the analysis method and conclusions in the recent Letter Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 127}, 176601 (2021) are unreliable. There are two problems in this Letter. Firstly, the characteristic described by the RG flows $m\rightarrow\infty$ and $D\rightarrow0$ can not be used as the criterion for transition from second-order TI to TI, since this characteristic could be essentially not induced by Coulomb interaction but only results from the trivial power counting contribution of fermion action. Indeed, this characteristic is satisfied even for free second-order TI. Second, the flow of $B$ is not paid attention, which is very important and should be seriously studied. In this article, we analyze carefully the corrections for the flows of the model parameters induced by Coulomb interaction. We find that the sign of $m$ changes but the sign of $B$ holds if the initial Coulomb strength is large enough, while the sign of $m$ holds but the sign of $B$ changes if the initial Coulomb strength takes small values. These results indicate that second-order TI is unstable to trivial band insulator not only under strong Coulomb interaction but also under weak Coulomb interaction. We also study the effects of disorder scattering in second-order TI by renormalization group theory. According to the criterion in Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 127}, 176601 (2021), weak disorder drives second-order TI to TI. However, we find that second-order TI is robust against weak disorder, since weak disorder does not give qualitative modification for second-order TI. This result is consistent with recent studies based on other methods. Interplay of Coulomb interaction and disorder in second-order TI is also investigated.