Particle-hole symmetries in condensed matter
Zirnbauer, Martin R.
Abstract
The term particle-hole symmetry is beset with conflicting meanings in contemporary physics. Conceived and written from a condensed-matter standpoint, the present paper aims to clarify and sharpen the terminology. In that vein, we propose to define the operation of particle-hole conjugation as the tautological algebra automorphism that simply swaps single-fermion creation and annihilation operators, and we construct its invariant lift to the Fock space. Particle-hole symmetries then arise for gapful or gapless free-fermion systems at half filling, as the concatenation of particle-hole conjugation with one or another involution that reverses the sign of the first-quantized Hamiltonian. We illustrate that construction principle with a series of examples including the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model and the Kitaev-Majorana chain. For an enhanced perspective, we contrast particle-hole symmetries with the charge-conjugation symmetry of relativistic Dirac fermions. We go on to present two major applications in the realm of interacting electrons. For one, we offer a heuristic argument that the celebrated Haldane phase of antiferromagnetic quantum spin chains is adiabatically connected to a free-fermion topological phase protected by a particle-hole symmetry. For another, we review the recent proposal by Son [Phys. Rev. X 5, 031027 (2015)] for a particle-hole conjugation symmetric effective field theory of the half-filled lowest Landau level, and we comment on the emerging microscopic picture of the composite fermion.