Topological phase in a one-dimensional interacting fermion system

Abstract

We study a one-dimensional interacting topological model by means of exact diagonalization method. The topological properties are firstly examined with the existence of the edge states at half-filling. We find that the topological phases are not only robust to small repulsive interactions but also are stabilized by small attractive interactions, and also finite repulsive interaction can drive a topological non-trivial phase into a trivial one while the attractive interaction can drive a trivial phase into a non-trivial one. Next we calculate the Berry phase and parity of the bulk system and find that they are equivalent in characterizing the topological phases. With them we obtain the critical interaction strengths and construct part of the phase diagram in the parameters space. Finally we discuss the effective Hamiltonian at large-U limit and provide additional understanding of the numerical results. Our these results could be realized experimentally using cold atoms trapped in the 1D optical lattice.