Corner charge and bulk multipole moment in periodic systems

Abstract: A formula for the corner charge in terms of the bulk quadrupole moment is derived for two-dimensional periodic systems. This is an analog of the formula for the surface charge density in terms of the bulk polarization. In the presence of an $n$-fold rotation symmetry with $n=3$, $4$, and $6$, the quadrupole moment is quantized and is independent of the spread or shape of Wannier orbitals, depending only on the location of Wannier centers of filled bands. In this case, our formula predicts the fractional part of the quadrupole moment purely from the bulk property. The system can contain many-body interactions as long as the ground state is gapped and topologically trivial in the sense it is smoothly connected to a product state limit. An extension of these results to three-dimensional systems is also discussed. In three dimensions, in general, even the fractional part of the corner charge is not fully predictable from the bulk perspective even in the presence of point group symmetry.