Fate of Bosonic Topological Edge Modes in the Presence of Many-Body Interactions

Abstract

Many magnetic materials are predicted to exhibit bosonic topological edge modes in their excitation spectra, because of the nontrivial topology of their magnon, triplon, or other quasi-particle band structures. However, there is a discrepancy between theory prediction and experimental observation, which suggests some underlying mechanism that intrinsically suppresses the expected experimental signatures, like the thermal Hall current. Many-body interactions that are not accounted for in the non-interacting quasi-particle picture are most often identified as the reason for the absence of the topological edge modes. Here we report persistent bosonic edge modes at the boundaries of a ladder quantum paramagnet with gapped triplon excitations in the presence of the full many-body interaction. We use tensor network methods to resolve topological edge modes in the time-dependent spin-spin correlations and the dynamical structure factor, which is directly accessible experimentally. We further show that signatures of these edge modes survive even when the non-interacting quasi-particle theory breaks down, discuss the topological phase diagram of the model, demonstrate the fractionalization of its low-lying excitations, and propose potential material candidates.