Spontaneously broken chiral symmetry in the interacting Kane-Mele model

TL;DR

This paper investigates the interacting Kane-Mele model on a hexagon lattice, revealing a spontaneously broken chiral symmetry leading to a non-chiral topological band insulator with unique edge states and spin currents.

Contribution

It introduces a new charge-order state with broken chiral symmetry and characterizes its properties and phase transitions within the Kane-Mele model using the slave rotor approach.

Findings

Emergence of a long-range charge-order state with broken chiral symmetry.

Identification of a non-chiral topological band insulator state.

Presence of helical edge states with net spin currents.

Abstract

The essential properties of the half-filled interacting Kane-Mele model on a hexagon lattice is studied using the slave rotor approach. It is shown clearly that a long-range charge-order state with spontaneously broken chiral symmetry emerges in the weak and moderate interaction regimes, as well as a presumed site-selected topological Mott insulator state in the stronger interaction regime with U < UMott, where UMott is the critical interaction strength, and in the case of U > UMott, the system is transited into the usual topological Mott state. This new charge-order state has lower energy compared to the usual topological band insulator (TBI) state with chiral symmetry, and thus is named as non-chiral TBI state. More specifically, in this non-chiral TBI state without any long-range magnetic order, a long-range charge order with different electron occupation on two sublattices appears in the absence of external sublattice field. The spontaneously broken chiral symmetry gives rise to a special helical edge state, which has different spin accumulation on opposite edges of the cylinder with periodic boundary condition in the zigzag direction, and thus leads to a net spin current across the system. This net spin current would be further strengthened if the nearest neighbor electron Coulomb interaction is taken into account as well, because it is favorable for the long-range charge order with different electron occupation on sublattices.