Helical Luttinger liquid on a space-time lattice

Abstract

The Luttinger model is a paradigm for the breakdown due to interactions of the Fermi liquid description of one-dimensional massless Dirac fermions. Attempts to discretize the model on a one-dimensional lattice have failed to reproduce the established bosonization results, because of the fermion-doubling obstruction: A local and symmetry-preserving discretization of the Hamiltonian introduces a spurious second species of low-energy excitations, while a nonlocal discretization opens a single-particle gap at the Dirac point. Here we show how to work around this obstruction, by discretizing both space and time to obtain a \textit{local} Lagrangian for a helical Luttinger liquid with Hubbard interaction. The approach enables quantum Monte Carlo simulations that preserve the topological protection of an unpaired Dirac cone.