Flow of unitary matrices: Real-space winding numbers in one and three dimensions

The notion of the flow introduced by Kitaev is a manifestly topological formulation of the winding number on a real lattice. First, we show in this paper that the flow is quite useful for practical numerical computations for systems without translational invariance. Second, we extend it to three dimensions. Namely, we derive a formula of the flow on a three-dimensional lattice, which corresponds to the conventional winding number when systems have translational invariance.