Fractionalization and Topology in Amorphous Electronic Solids
Sunghoon Kim, Adhip Agarwala, Debanjan Chowdhury
Abstract
Band topology is traditionally analyzed in terms of gauge-invariant observables associated with crystalline Bloch wave functions. Recent work has demonstrated that many of the free fermion topological characteristics survive even in an amorphous setting. In this Letter, we extend these studies to incorporate the effect of strong repulsive interactions on the fate of topology and other correlation induced phenomena. Using a parton-based mean-field approach, we obtain the interacting phase diagram for an electronic two-orbital model with tunable topology in a two-dimensional amorphous network. In addition to the (non-)topological phases that are adiabatically connected to the free fermion limit, we find a number of strongly interacting amorphous analogs of crystalline Mott insulating phases with nontrivial chiral neutral edge modes, and a fractionalized Anderson insulating phase. The amorphous networks thus provide a new playground for studying a plethora of exotic states of matter, and their glassy dynamics, due to the combined effects of nontrivial topology, disorder, and strong interactions.