Topological classification of insulators: I. Non-interacting spectrally-gapped one-dimensional systems

Abstract

We study non-interacting electrons in disordered one-dimensional materials that exhibit a spectral gap, in each of the ten Altland-Zirnbauer symmetry classes. We define an appropriate topology on the space of Hamiltonians, such that the so-called strong topological invariants become complete invariants, yielding the one-dimensional column of the Kitaev periodic table, but now derived without recourse to K-theory. We thus confirm the conjecture regarding a one-to-one correspondence between topological phases of gapped non-interacting 1D systems and the respective Abelian groups $\left\{0\right\},Z,2Z,Z_2$ in the spectral-gap regime. The main tool we develop is an equivariant theory of homotopies of local unitaries and orthogonal projections. Moreover, we discuss an extension of the unitary theory to partial isometries, to provide a perspective toward the understanding of strongly-disordered, mobility-gapped materials.