A hallmark property of topological phases is their quantized response to defects. In crystalline systems, considerable effort has been devoted to understanding how topological defects of the underlying lattice affect the electron fluids they host. While the case of fractionalized phases is both theoretically rich and experimentally relevant, with numerous materials now shown to harbour fractional Chern insulators, analytical tools for extracting the crystalline response of these phases are limited. In this work, we address this problem using the coupled-wire construction of fractional quantum Hall phases, which we extend to geometries with lattice dislocations and disclinations. We clarify how distinct crystalline quantum Hall phases arise within the coupled-wire framework and explicitly calculate the fractional charges that bind to the aforementioned lattice defects in each of these phases. We also calculate the Berry phases for braiding anyons around defects and directly relate these to the fractional bound charges. Our work establishes the coupled-wire framework as an analytically-tractable setting for studying crystalline symmetry-enriched topological phases.
Coupled-wire theory of crystalline geometric response in fractional quantum Hall fluids
Host: Valentin Crepel