CMSA Quantum Matter in Mathematics and Physics: Emergent spacetime supersymmetry in topological phases of matter

CMSA EVENTS

Speaker:

Hong Yao - Tsinghua

No definitive evidence of spacetime supersymmetry (SUSY) that transmutes fermions into bosons and vice versa has been revealed in nature so far. One may wonder whether SUSY can be realized in quantum materials. In this talk, I shall discuss how spacetime SUSY may emerge, in the sense of renormalization group flow, in the bulk of Weyl semimetals or at the boundary of topological insulators. Moreover, we have performed large-scale sign-problem-free quantum Monte Carlo simulations of various microscopic lattice models to numerically verify the emergence of spacetime SUSY at quantum critical points on the boundary of topological phases. I shall mention some experimental signatures such as optical conductivity which can be measured to test such emergent SUSY in candidate systems like the surface of 3D topological insulators.
References:
[1] Shao-Kai Jian, Yi-Fan Jiang, and Hong Yao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 114, 237001 (2015)
[2] Shao-Kai Jian, Chien-Hung Lin, Joseph Maciejko, and Hong Yao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 166802 (2017)
[3] Zi-Xiang Li, Yi-Fan Jiang, and Hong Yao, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 107202 (2017)
[4] Zi-Xiang Li, Abolhassan Vaezi, Christian Mendl, and Hong Yao, Science Advances 4, eaau1463 (2018)

Zoom: https://harvard.zoom.us/j/977347126