Anomalous Currents on Closed Surfaces: Extended Proximity, Partial Quantization, and Qubits

Abstract

Motivated by the surface of topological insulators, the Dirac anomaly's discontinuous dependence on sign of the mass, $m/|m|$, is investigated on closed topologies when mass terms are weak or only partially cover the surface. It is found that, unlike the massive Dirac theory on an infinite plane, there is a smoothly decreasing current when the mass region is not infinite; also, a massive finite region fails to exhibit a Hall current edge--exerting an extended proximity effect, which can, however, be uniformly small--and oppositely orientated Hall phases are fully quantized while accompanied by diffuse chiral modes. Examples are computed using Dirac energy eigenstates on a flat torus (genus one topology) and closed cap cylinder (genus zero topology) for various mass-term geometries. Finally, from the resulting the properties of the surface spectra, a potential application for a flux-charge qubit is presented.

Comments: 22 pages, 13 figures. References and focus updated. Added effective action arguments. Same text as published version