Topological and magnetic phases of interacting electrons in the pyrochlore iridates

Understand

We construct a model for interacting electrons with strong spin orbit coupling in the pyrochlore iridates.

• We establish the importance of the direct hopping process between the Ir atoms and use the relative strength of the direct and indirect hopping as a generic tuning parameter to study the correlation effects across the iridates family.
• We predict novel quantum phase transitions between conventional and/or topologically non-trivial phases.
• At weak coupling, we find topological insulator and metallic phases.