We study the ground-state phase diagram of an interacting staggered Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) ladder in the vicinity of the Gaussian quantum critical point. The corresponding effective field theory, which nonperturbatively treats correlation effects in the ladder, is a double-frequency sine-Gordon (DSG) model. It involves two perturbations at the Gaussian fixed point: the deviation from criticality, and umklapp scattering processes. While massive phases with broken symmetries are identified by means of local order parameters, a topological distinction between thermodynamically equivalent phases becomes feasible only when nonlocal fermionic fields, parity, and the string order parameter are included in consideration. We prove that a noninteracting fermionic staggered SSH ladder is exactly equivalent to an O(2)-symmetric model of two decoupled Kitaev-Majorana chains, or two one-dimensional $p$-wave superconductors. Close to the Gaussian fixed point, the SSH ladder maps to an Ashkin-Teller-like system when interactions are included. Thus, the topological order in the SSH ladder is related to broken-symmetry phases of the associated quantum spin-chain degrees of freedom. The obtained phase diagram includes a Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid state that, due to umklapp processes, can become unstable against either spontaneous dimerization or the onset of a charge-density wave (CDW). In these gapped phases, elementary bulk excitations are quantum kinks carrying the charge $Q_F=1/2$. For sufficiently strong, long-range interactions, the phase diagram of the model exhibits a bifurcation of the Gaussian critical point into two outgoing Ising criticalities. The latter sandwich a mixed phase in which dimerization coexists with a site-diagonal CDW. In this phase, elementary bulk excitations are represented by two types of topological solitons carrying different fermionic charges, which continuously interpolate between 0 and 1. This phase has also mixed topological properties with coexisting parity and string order parameters.

• Received 20 May 2020
• Revised 22 June 2020
• Accepted 22 June 2020

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevB.102.045108