Topological superconductors are exotic phases of matter featuring robust surface states that could be leveraged for topological quantum computation. A useful guiding principle for the search of topological superconductors is to relate the topological invariants with the behavior of the pairing order parameter on the normal-state Fermi surfaces. The existing formulas, however, become inadequate for the prediction of the recently proposed classes of topological crystalline superconductors. In this work, we advance the theory of symmetry indicators for topological (crystalline) superconductors to cover all space groups. Our main result is the exhaustive computation of the indicator groups for superconductors under a variety of symmetry settings. We further illustrate the power of this approach by analyzing fourfold symmetric superconductors with or without inversion symmetry and show that the indicators can diagnose topological superconductors with surface states of different dimensionalities or dictate gaplessness in the bulk excitation spectrum.
A formula for the corner charge in terms of the bulk quadrupole moment is derived for twodimensional periodic systems. This is an analog of the formula for the surface charge density in terms of the bulk polarization. In the presence of a n-fold rotation symmetry with n = 3, 4, and 6, the quadrupole moment is quantized and is independent of the spread or shape of Wannier orbitals, depending only on the location of Wannier centers of filled bands. In this case, our formula predicts the fractional part of the quadrupole moment purely from the bulk property. The system can contain many-body interactions as long as the ground state is gapped and topologically trivial in the sense it is smoothly connected to a product state limit. An extension of these results to three-dimensional systems is also discussed. In three dimensions, in general, even the fractional part of the corner charge is not fully predictable from the bulk perspective even in the presence of point group symmetry.
The interplay between symmetry and topology in electronic band structures has been one of the central subjects in condensed-matter physics. Recently, it has been getting clear that a wide variety of useful information about the band topology can be extracted by focusing the symmetry representations of valence bands without computing Wilson loops. In this work, we extend the previous studies on this subject to all 10 Altland-Zirnbauer symmetry classes in each of 230 space groups. We derive various general statements that should be useful in the search for topological superconductors and topological semimetals.
The systematic diagnosis of band topology enabled by the method of "symmetry indicators" underlies the recent advances in the search for new materials realizing topological crystalline insulators. Such an efficient method has been missing for superconductors because the quasi-particle spectrum in the superconducting phase is not usually available. In this work, we establish symmetry indicators for weak-coupling superconductors that detect nontrivial topology based on the representations of the metallic band structure in the normal phase assuming a symmetry property of the gap function. We demonstrate the applications of our formulae using examples of tight-binding models and density-functional-theory band structures of realistic materials.
Electric multipole moments are the most fundamental properties of insulating materials. However, the general formulation of bulk multipoles has been a long standing problem. The solution for the electric dipole moment was provided decades ago by King-Smith, Vanderbilt, and Resta. Recently, there have been attempts at generalizing Resta's formula to higher-order multipoles. We point out several issues in the recent proposals.
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