Interactions and the θ [theta] term in one-dimensional gapped systems

Abstract

We study how the θ [theta] term is affected by interactions in certain one-dimensional gapped systems that preserve charge conjugation, parity, and time-reversal invariance. We exploit the relation between the chiral anomaly of a fermionic system and the classical shift symmetry of its bosonized dual. The vacuum expectation value of the dual boson is identified with the value of the θ [theta] term for the corresponding fermionic system. Two (related) examples illustrate the identification. We first consider the massive Luttinger liquid and find the θ [theta] term to be insensitive to the strength of the interaction. Next we study the continuum limit of the Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain, perturbed by a second nearest-neighbor spin interaction. For a certain range of the XXZ anisotropy, we find that we can tune between two distinct sets of topological phases by varying the second nearest-neighbor coupling. In the first we find the standard vacua at θ=0,π [theta = 0, pi], while the second contains vacua that spontaneously break charge conjugation and parity with fractional θ/π=1/2,3/2 [0/pi = 1/2, 3/2]. We also study quantized pumping in both examples following recent work.