Topological insulators and their intriguing edge states can be understood in a singleparticle picture and can as such be exhaustively classified. Interactions significantly complicate this picture and can lead to entirely new insulating phases, with an altogether much richer and less explored phenomenology. Most saliently, lattice generalizations of fractional quantum Hall states, dubbed fractional Chern insulators, have recently been predicted to be stabilized by interactions within nearly dispersionless bands with non-zero Chern number, C. Contrary to their continuum analogues, these states do not require an external magnetic field and may potentially persist even at room temperature, which make these systems very attractive for possible applications such as topological quantum computation. This review recapitulates the basics of tight-binding models hosting nearly flat bands with non-trivial topology, C = 0, and summarizes the present understanding of interactions and strongly correlated phases within these bands. Emphasis is made on microscopic models, highlighting the analogy with continuum Landau level physics, as well as qualitatively new, lattice specific, aspects including Berry curvature fluctuations, competing instabilities as well as novel collective states of matter emerging in bands with |C| > 1. Possible experimental realizations, including oxide interfaces and cold atom implementations as well as generalizations to flat bands characterized by other topological invariants are also discussed.

Lattice models forming bands with higher Chern number offer an intriguing possibility for new phases of matter with no analogue in continuum Landau levels. Here, we establish the existence of a number of new bulk insulating states at fractional filling in flat bands with a Chern number C = N > 1, forming in a recently proposed pyrochlore model with strong spin-orbit coupling. In particular, we find compelling evidence for a series of stable states at ν = 1/(2N + 1) for fermions as well as bosonic states at ν = 1/(N + 1). By examining the topological ground state degeneracies and the excitation structure as well as the entanglement spectrum, we conclude that these states are Abelian. We also explicitly demonstrate that these states are nevertheless qualitatively different from conventional quantum Hall (multilayer) states due to the novel properties of the underlying band structure.

We study the phase diagram of interacting electrons in a dispersionless Chern band as a function of their filling. We find hierarchy multiplets of incompressible states at fillings ν = 1/3, 2/5, 3/7, 4/9, 5/9, 4/7, 3/5 as well as ν = 1/5, 2/7. These are accounted for by an analogy to Haldane pseudopotentials extracted from an analysis of the two-particle problem. Important distinctions to standard fractional quantum Hall physics are striking: in the absence of particle-hole symmetry in a single band, an interaction-induced single-hole dispersion appears, which perturbs and eventually destabilizes incompressible states as ν increases. For this reason, the nature of the state at ν = 2/3 is hard to pin down, while ν = 5/7, 4/5 do not seem to be incompressible in our system.

Moiré flatbands, occurring e.g. in twisted bilayer graphene at magic angles, have attracted ample interest due to their high degree of experimental tunability and the intriguing possibility of generating novel strongly interacting phases. Here we consider the core problem of Coulomb interactions within fractionally filled spin and valley polarized Moiré flatbands and demonstrate that the dual description in terms of holes, which acquire a non-trivial hole-dispersion, provides key physical intuition and enables the use of standard perturbative techniques for this strongly correlated problem. In experimentally relevant examples such as ABC stacked trilayer and twisted bilayer graphene aligned with boron nitride, it leads to emergent interaction-driven Fermi liquid states at electronic filling fractions down to around 1/3 and 2/3 respectively. At even lower filling fractions, the electron density still faithfully tracks the single-hole dispersion while exhibiting distinct non-Fermi liquid behavior. Most saliently, we provide microscopic evidence that high temperature fractional Chern insulators can form in twisted bilayer graphene aligned with hexagonal boron nitride.Setup. Motived by the recent discoveries [11][12][13]15] along with theoretical predictions [16,21] of spin and valley polarized insulators at integer fillings in various Moiré bands, we consider electrons with polarized spin arXiv:1912.04907v1 [cond-mat.mes-hall]

We show that, quite generically, a [111] slab of spin-orbit coupled pyrochlore lattice exhibits surface states whose constant energy curves take the shape of Fermi arcs, localized to different surfaces depending on their quasi-momentum. Remarkably, these persist independently of the existence of Weyl points in the bulk. Considering interacting electrons in slabs of finite thickness, we find a plethora of known fractional Chern insulating phases, to which we add the discovery of a new higher Chern number state which is likely a generalization of the Moore-Read fermionic fractional quantum Hall state. By contrast, in the three-dimensional limit, we argue for the absence of gapped states of the flat surface band due to a topologically protected coupling of the surface to gapless states in the bulk. We comment on generalizations as well as experimental perspectives in thin slabs of pyrochlore iridates. [13,[15][16][17], interaction effects on the gapless surface of topological insulators [18][19][20][21][22], and strongly correlated phases akin to fractional quantum Hall states in two-dimensional (2D) lattices (see Refs. [23,24] and references therein). Drawing additional inspiration from the rapid development of growth techniques in fabricating high quality slabs/films/interfaces of oxide materials [25], this work provides intriguing connections between these seemingly disparate frontiers.The materials pursuit for Weyl semi-metals and its relatives is rapidly broadening [26][27][28][29], with spin-orbit coupled pyrochlore iridates, such as Y 2 Ir 2 O 7 [13, 30-32] being particularly promising compounds-as these are favourably grown/cleaved in the [111] direction, and given their predicted rich variety of strongly correlated phases [33,34], we here study the surface bands of pyrochlore [111] slabs, where the system can be seen as a layered structure of alternating kagome and triangular layers [30] (Fig. 1).Our work uncovers an intriguing dichotomy between bulk and surface states which allows us to establish connections between apparently disparate topological phenomena. While the bulk band structure changes drastically as a function of the inter-layer tunneling strength t ⊥ -including the (dis)appearance of the Weyl semi-metal-the surface states, which involve only the kagome layers, remain unchanged on account of their essentially geometrical origin. Most saliently, in the two distinct regimes of N weakly coupled kagome lay-

We provide a detailed study of the Abelian quasiholes of ν = 1/2 bosonic fractional quantum Hall states on the torus geometry and in fractional Chern insulators. We find that the density distribution of a quasihole in a fractional Chern insulator can be related to that of the corresponding fractional quantum Hall state by choosing an appropriate length unit on the lattice. This length unit only depends on the lattice model that hosts the fractional Chern insulator. Therefore, the quasihole size in a fractional Chern insulator can be predicted for any lattice model once the quasihole size of the corresponding fractional quantum Hall state is known. We discuss the effect of the lattice embedding on the quasihole size. We also perform the braiding of quasiholes for fractional Chern insulator models to probe the fractional statistics of these excitations. The numerical values of the braiding phases accurately match the theoretical predictions.

The recent theoretical discovery of fractional Chern insulators (FCIs) has provided an important new way to realize topologically ordered states in lattice models. In earlier works, on-site and nearest-neighbor Hubbard-like interactions have been used extensively to stabilize Abelian FCIs in systems with nearly flat, topologically nontrivial bands. However, attempts to use two-body interactions to stabilize non-Abelian FCIs, where the ground state in the presence of impurities can be massively degenerate and manipulated through anyon braiding, have proven very difficult in uniform lattice systems. Here, we study the remarkable effect of long-range interactions in a lattice model that possesses an exactly flat lowest band with a unit Chern number. When spinless bosons with two-body long-range interactions partially fill the lowest Chern band, we find convincing evidence of gapped, bosonic Read-Rezayi (RR) phases with non-Abelian anyon statistics. We characterize these states through studying topological degeneracies, the overlap between the ground states of two-body interactions and the exact RR ground states of three-and four-body interactions, and state counting in the particle-cut entanglement spectrum. Moreover, we demonstrate how an approximate lattice form of Haldane's pseudopotentials, analogous to that in the continuum, can be used as an efficient guiding principle in the search for lattice models with stable non-Abelian phases.

We introduce a quench of the geometry of Landau level orbitals as a probe of nonequilibrium dynamics of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states. We show that such geometric quenches induce coherent many-body dynamics of neutral degrees of freedom of FQH fluids. The simplest case of mass anisotropy quench can be experimentally implemented as a sudden tilt of the magnetic field, and the resulting dynamics reduces to the harmonic motion of the spin-2 "graviton" mode, i.e., the long wavelength limit of the Girvin-MacDonald-Platzman magnetoroton. We derive an analytical description of the graviton dynamics using the bimetric theory of FQH states, and find agreement with exact numerical simulations at short times. We show that certain types of geometric quenches excite higher-spin collective modes, thus establishing their existence in a microscopic model and motivating an extension of geometric theories of FQH states.