Adiabatic continuity, wave-function overlap, and topological phase transitions

In this paper, we study the relation between wave-function overlap and adiabatic continuity in gapped quantum systems. We show that for two band insulators, a scalar function can be defined in the momentum space, which characterizes the wave-function overlap between Bloch states in the two insulators. If this overlap is nonzero for all momentum points in the Brillouin zone, these two insulators are adiabatically connected, i.e., we can deform one insulator into the other smoothly without closing the band gap. In addition, we further prove that this adiabatic path preserves all the symmetries of the insulators. The existence of such an adiabatic path implies that two insulators with nonzero wave-function overlap belong to the same topological phase. This relation, between adiabatic continuity and wave-function overlap, can be further generalized to correlated systems. The generalized relation cannot be applied to study generic many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit, because of the orthogonality catastrophe. However, for certain interacting systems (e.g., quantum Hall systems), the quantum wave-function overlap can be utilized to distinguish different quantum states. Experimental implications are also discussed.