Nature of continuous phase transitions in interacting topological insulators

We revisit the effects of the Hubbard repulsion on quantum spin Hall effects (QSHE) in two-dimensional quantum lattice models. We present both unbiased exact diagonalization and density-matrix renormalization group simulations with numerical evidence for a continuous quantum phase transition (CQPT) separating QSHE from the topologically trivial antiferromagnetic phase. Our numerical results suggest that the nature of CQPT exhibits distinct finite-size scaling behaviors, which may be consistent with either Ising or XY universality classes for different time-reversal symmetric QSHE systems.