Dimensional Hierarchy of Fermionic Interacting Topological Phases

We present a dimensional reduction argument to derive the classification reduction of fermionic symmetry protected topological phases in the presence of interactions. The dimensional reduction proceeds by relating the topological character of a d-dimensional system to the number of zero-energy bound states localized at zero-dimensional topological defects present at its surface. This correspondence leads to a general condition for symmetry preserving interactions that render the system topologically trivial, and allows us to explicitly write a quartic interaction to this end. Our reduction shows that all phases with topological invariant smaller than n are topologically distinct, thereby reducing the noninteracting Z classification to Z(n).