Universalities of thermodynamic signatures in topological phases

S. N. Kempkes, A. Quelle, C. Morais Smith

Published 2016-07-12Version 1

Topological insulators (superconductors) are materials that host symmetry-protected metallic edge states in an insulating (superconducting) bulk. Although they are currently well understood, a thermodynamic description remained elusive, firstly because the edges are lost in the thermodynamic limit, and secondly because topological field theories involve non-local order parameters, and cannot be captured by the Ginzburg-Landau formalism. Recently, this challenge has been overcome: by using Hill thermodynamics to describe the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in two dimensions, it was shown that at the topological phase change the thermodynamic potential does not scale extensively due to boundary effects. Here, we extend this approach to different topological models in various dimensions (the Kitaev chain and Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model in one dimension, the Kane-Mele model in two dimensions and the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in three dimensions) at zero temperature. Surprisingly, all models exhibit the same universal behavior in the order of the topological-phase transition, depending on the dimension. Moreover, we derive the topological phase diagram at finite temperature using this thermodynamic description, and show that it displays a good agreement with the one calculated from the Uhlmann phase. Our work reveals unexpected universalities and opens the path to a thermodynamic description of systems with a non-local order parameter.