An effective spin-orbit coupling can be generated in a cold atom system by engineering atom-light interactions. In this Letter we study spin-1/2 and spin-1 Bose-Einstein condensates with Rashba spin-orbit coupling, and find that the condensate wave function will develop nontrivial structures. From numerical simulation we have identified two different phases. In one phase the ground state is a single plane wave, and often we find the system splits into domains and an array of vortices plays the role of a domain wall. In this phase, time-reversal symmetry is broken. In the other phase the condensate wave function is a standing wave, and it forms a spin stripe. The transition between them is driven by interactions between bosons. We also provide an analytical understanding of these results and determine the transition point between the two phases.

It has recently been realized that a general class of non-abelian defects can be created in conventional topological states by introducing extrinsic defects, such as lattice dislocations or superconductor-ferromagnet domain walls in conventional quantum Hall states or topological insulators. In this paper, we begin by placing these defects within the broader conceptual scheme of extrinsic twist defects associated with symmetries of the topological state. We explicitly study several classes of examples, including Z2 and Z3 twist defects, where the topological state with N twist defects can be mapped to a topological state without twist defects on a genus g ∝ N surface. To emphasize this connection we refer to the twist defects as genons. We develop methods to compute the projective non-abelian braiding statistics of the genons, and we find the braiding is given by adiabatic modular transformations, or Dehn twists, of the topological state on the effective genus g surface. We study the relation between this projective braiding statistics and the ordinary nonabelian braiding statistics obtained when the genons become deconfined, finite-energy excitations. We find that the braiding is generally different, in contrast to the Majorana case, which opens the possibility for fundamentally novel behavior. We find situations where the genons have quantum dimension 2 and can be used for universal topological quantum computing (TQC), while the host topological state is by itself non-universal for TQC.

Prominent systems like the high-T_{c} cuprates and heavy fermions display intriguing features going beyond the quasiparticle description. The Sachdev-Ye-Kitaev (SYK) model describes a (0+1)D quantum cluster with random all-to-all four-fermion interactions among N fermion modes which becomes exactly solvable as N→∞, exhibiting a zero-dimensional non-Fermi-liquid with emergent conformal symmetry and complete absence of quasiparticles. Here we study a lattice of complex-fermion SYK dots with random intersite quadratic hopping. Combining the imaginary time path integral with real time path integral formulation, we obtain a heavy Fermi liquid to incoherent metal crossover in full detail, including thermodynamics, low temperature Landau quasiparticle interactions, and both electrical and thermal conductivity at all scales. We find linear in temperature resistivity in the incoherent regime, and a Lorentz ratio L≡(κρ/T) varies between two universal values as a function of temperature. Our work exemplifies an analytically controlled study of a strongly correlated metal.

The structure of extrinsic defects in topologically ordered states of matter is host to a rich set of universal physics. Extrinsic defects in 2+1 dimensional topological states include line-like defects, such as boundaries between topologically distinct states, and point-like defects, such as junctions between different line defects. Gapped boundaries in particular can themselves be \it topologically \rm distinct, and the junctions between them can localize topologically protected zero modes, giving rise to topological ground state degeneracies and projective non-Abelian statistics. In this paper, we develop a general theory of point defects and gapped line defects in 2+1 dimensional Abelian topological states. We derive a classification of topologically distinct gapped boundaries in terms of certain maximal subgroups of quasiparticles with mutually bosonic statistics, called Lagrangian subgroups. The junctions between different gapped boundaries provide a general classification of point defects in topological states, including as a special case the twist defects considered in previous works. We derive a general formula for the quantum dimension of these point defects, a general understanding of their localized "parafermion" zero modes, and we define a notion of projective non-Abelian statistics for them. The critical phenomena between topologically distinct gapped boundaries can be understood in terms of a general class of quantum spin chains or, equivalently, "generalized parafermion" chains. This provides a way of realizing exotic 1+1D generalized parafermion conformal field theories in condensed matter systems.Comment: 24 pages, 11 figures. Some of the results here are also summarized in arXiv:1304.7579; v2: strengthened braiding results and mapping to genons, updated refs/acknowledgment