
2
therefore relevant. Recent advances in unraveling the
phase diagram of two interacting Bloch spheres [21, 22]
revealed also the emergence of a fractional topological
phase at large interactions. In fact, for the single Kitaev
wire, there exists a well-established map onto the Bloch
sphere through the Bogoliubov-De Gennes representa-
tion [22, 23]. Thus these recent findings stimulate us to
investigate the DCI phase further, and in particular its
link to the fractional Bloch sphere phase in [21].
The extensions beyond non-interacting chains are
plentiful and there is a lot of ground to cover. In
this paper we focus in particular on deepening our
understanding of the DCI phase, its link to fractional
topology as well as the effects of an inter-wire hopping
amplitude t⊥on the phase diagram found in [1]. We
first propose in Sec. II topological invariants for the
one-dimensional superconducting Kitaev chains, which
by mapping onto the Bloch sphere are found to be
direct analogs of the TKNN invariant [3]. We show that
these quantities, defined through two-point correlation
functions, can be extended to two or more wires and
that they remain powerful tools and topological markers
to study the phases of coupled wires also in the presence
of interactions. We evaluate these correlation functions
using Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG)
calculations [24–26]. In Sec. III, we elaborate on
the C= 1/2 topological invariant(s) associated with
the critical theory of the Majorana fermions at the
topological quantum phase transition for one Kitaev
wire, and we establish a relation with the Bloch sphere.
In Sec. IV, we first review briefly the regions in the
phase diagram of two interacting superconducting wires
[1]. We present an approach to understanding the
underlying quantum field theory (QFT) of both the
single and double critical Ising (DCI) phases [1] in terms
of chiral bulk modes, intimately related to the critical
theory of a single Kitaev wire. Then, in Sec. IV B,
we show with DMRG calculations that our topological
markers take on fractional values of C= 1/2 in the
DCI phase, which establishes a clear link between the
topological phases of two interacting Bloch spheres [21].
Furthermore, we argue that this also strengthens the
notion that the DCI phase is described by two c= 1/2
critical models per wire where now crefers to the central
charge [27–30] of the model.
Finally in Sec. V we also investigate both numerically
and analytically the phase diagram in [1] in the pres-
ence of an inter-wire hopping amplitude t⊥, similar to
the ladders studied in [14], to determine the stability of
the coupled-wire phases towards more experimentally re-
alistic setups. It is perhaps relevant to mention here that
the t⊥term does not have a simple correspondence on
the Bloch spheres’ model since mapping fermions onto
spins-1
2through the Jordan-Wigner transformation will
result in “strings” accompanying this operator in the
spin language. Therefore, it is worthwhile studying the
effect of such a perturbation in the two-wires’ model.
The strength of the t⊥term compared to the Coulomb
interaction may be adjusted by fixing the distance be-
tween the two wires (a hopping term is supposed to de-
cay exponentially with distance from a Wentzel-Kramers-
Brillouin picture). We find that for perturbative values
of t⊥the DCI phase and phase diagram remain robust.
We study the phase diagram for larger values of the inter-
wires hopping term, as well as interactions. We also ad-
dress the case for prominent interactions between both
wires, which gives rise to Mott physics [1] in the |g|→∞
limit. Our results are finally summarized in VI. In Ap-
pendices, we present additional information on DMRG
and quantum field theory.
II. TOPOLOGICAL MARKERS FROM
CORRELATION FUNCTIONS
The aim of this section is to define topological invari-
ants for Kitaev p-wave spin-polarized superconducting
wires [10], and express these quantities in terms of real-
space correlation functions. First, we remind the reader
of the Kitaev wire [10], and associated Bogoliubov-De
Gennes formalism, which due to the particle-hole sym-
metry of the Kitaev wire allows a direct mapping onto a
single Bloch sphere [22, 23, 31]. From this, a definition
of a Chern number `a la [21] leads directly to the desired
real-space correlation functions. Then, by similar consid-
erations, we argue that in the case of two weakly inter-
acting wires in the sense of [1], a mapping on two-coupled
Bloch spheres remains sensible [22]. Whilst the quanti-
zation of the invariants is no longer guaranteed, we show
numerically using DMRG that these Chern numbers re-
main sensible markers to characterize and investigate the
topological phases in the presence of interactions.
A. Review of the Kitaev wire and its topological
phase diagram
In this article we investigate the topological phases
of (interacting and coupled) Kitaev wires of spinless
fermions. The Kitaev wire is defined by the following
Hamiltonian [8, 10]
HK=−µX
j
nj−tX
j
c†
jcj+1 + h.c.
+4eiϕ X
j
c†
jc†
j+1 + h.c..
(1)
Here µis the chemical potential acting globally on both
wires, tis the hopping amplitude, ∆eiϕ the supercon-
ducting pairing-strength with phase ϕand nc,j =c†
jcj.
The single wire has two topologically distinct extended
phases. A topological phase transition occurs at the criti-
cal chemical potentials µ=±2t. In his seminal work [10],
Kitaev developed an intuitive picture of these phases, by