Insulator, conductor and commensurability: a topological approach

Abstract

I discuss a topological relation of the conduction property of a many-particle system on a periodic lattice at zero temperature to the energy spectrum. When the particle number per unit cell is an irreducible fraction $p/q$, an insulator must have $q$ low-lying states of energy $o(1/L)$ in one dimension and of energy $o(1)$ in two dimensions, where $L$ is the linear system size.