Inducing a many-body topological state of matter through Coulomb-engineered local interactions

The engineering of artificial systems hosting topological excitations is at the heart of current condensed matter research. Most of these efforts focus on single-particle properties, neglecting possible engineering routes via the modifications of the fundamental many-body interactions. Interestingly, recent experimental breakthroughs have shown that Coulomb interactions can be efficiently controlled by substrate screening engineering. Inspired by this success, we propose a simple platform in which topologically nontrivial many-body excitations emerge solely from dielectrically engineered Coulomb interactions in an otherwise topologically trivial single-particle band structure. Furthermore, by performing a realistic microscopic modeling of screening engineering, we demonstrate how our proposal can be realized in one-dimensional systems such as quantum-dot chains. Our results put forward Coulomb engineering as a powerful tool to create topological excitations, with potential applications in a variety of solid-state platforms.