Stable Bosonic Topological Edge Modes in the Presence of Many-Body Interactions
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 stable bosonic edge modes at the boundaries of a ladder quantum paramagnet with gapped triplon excitations in the presence of the full many-body interaction. For the first time, 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 these edge modes have anomalously long time coherence, discuss the topological phase diagram of the model, demonstrate the fractionalization of its low-lying excitations, and propose potential material candidates.