Emil Prodan - Böcker

This monograph offers an overview of rigorous results on fermionic topological insulators from the complex classes, namely, those without symmetries or with just a chiral symmetry. Particular focus is on the stability of the topological invariants in the presence of strong disorder, on the interplay between the bulk and boundary invariants and on their dependence on magnetic fields.The first part presents motivating examples and the conjectures put forward by the physics community, together with a brief review of the experimental achievements. The second part develops an operator algebraic approach for the study of disordered topological insulators. This leads naturally to the use of analytical tools from K-theory and non-commutative geometry, such as cyclic cohomology, quantized calculus with Fredholm modules and index pairings. New results include a generalized Streda formula and a proof of the delocalized nature of surface states in topological insulators with non-trivialinvariants. The concluding chapter connects the invariants to measurable quantities and thus presents a refined physical characterization of the complex topological insulators. This book is intended for advanced students in mathematical physics and researchers alike.

This work presents a computational program based on the principles of non-commutative geometry and showcases several applications to topological insulators. Noncommutative geometry has been originally proposed by Jean Bellissard as a theoretical framework for the investigation of homogeneous condensed matter systems. Recently, this approach has been successfully applied to topological insulators, where it facilitated many rigorous results concerning the stability of the topological invariants against disorder.In the first part of the book the notion of a homogeneous material is introduced and the class of disordered crystals defined together with the classification table, which conjectures all topological phases from this class. The manuscript continues with a discussion of electrons’ dynamics in disordered crystals and the theory of topological invariants in the presence of strong disorder is briefly reviewed. It is shown how all this can be captured in the language of noncommutative geometry using the concept of non-commutative Brillouin torus, and a list of known formulas for various physical response functions is presented. In the second part, auxiliary algebras are introduced and a canonical finite-volume approximation of the non-commutative Brillouin torus is developed. Explicit numerical algorithms for computing generic correlation functions are discussed. In the third part upper bounds on the numerical errors are derived and it is proved that the canonical-finite volume approximation converges extremely fast to the thermodynamic limit. Convergence tests and various applications concludes the presentation.The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in numerical and mathematical physics.