Published July 6, 2023 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Loops in 4+1d topological phases

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon Cornell University
  • 3. ROR icon Institute for Advanced Study
  • 4. ROR icon University of California, Santa Barbara

Abstract

2+1d topological phases are well characterized by the fusion rules and braiding/exchange statistics of fractional point excitations. In 4+1d, some topological phases contain only fractional loop excitations. What kind of loop statistics exist? We study the 4+1d gauge theory with 2-form ℤ₂ gauge field (the loop-only toric code) and find that while braiding statistics between two different types of loops can be nontrivial, the self "exchange" statistics are all trivial. In particular, we show that the electric, magnetic, and dyonic loop excitations in the 4+1d toric code are not distinguished by their self-statistics. They tunnel into each other across 3+1d invertible domain walls which in turn give explicit unitary circuits that map the loop excitations into each other. The SL(2, ℤ₂) symmetry that permutes the loops, however, cannot be consistently gauged and we discuss the associated obstruction in the process. Moreover, we discuss a gapless boundary condition dubbed the "fractional Maxwell theory" and show how it can be Higgsed into gapped boundary conditions. We also discuss the generalization of these results from the ℤ₂ gauge group to ℤN.

Additional Information

© 2023 X. Chen et al. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Published by the SciPost Foundation. We would like to thank Fiona Burnell, Meng Cheng, Lukasz Fidkowski, Jeongwan Haah, Yi Ni, Xiao-Liang Qi, Nathan Seiberg, Shu-Heng Shao, KevinWalker and ZhenghanWang for valuable discussions. A.D. thanks Yu-An Chen for the useful discussion on higher cup products. W.S., A.D., and X.C. were supported by the Simons Foundation through the collaboration on Ultra-Quantum Matter (651438, XC, AD), theWalter Burke Institute of Theoretical Physics, the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, an NSF Physics Frontiers Center (PHY-1733907), the National Science Foundation (DMR-1654340, XC) and the Simons Investigator Award (828078, XC).W.S. is also supported by a grant from the Simons Foundation (651444, WS). The work of P.-S. H. is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of High Energy Physics, under Award Number DE-SC0011632, by the Simons Foundation through the Simons Investigator Award, and by the Simons Collaboration on Global Categorical Symmetries. C.-M. J. is supported by a faculty startup grant at Cornell University. C. X. is supported by NSF Grant No. DMR-1920434 and the Simons Investigator program.

Attached Files

Published - SciPostPhys_15_1_001.pdf

Files

SciPostPhys_15_1_001.pdf

Files (2.1 MB)

Name Size
md5:fe85e2ed34f8b09bb8a9efca118b5853
2.1 MB Preview Download

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
122546
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20230726-216909500.5

Funding

Simons Foundation
651438
Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech
Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)
NSF
PHY-1733907
NSF
DMR-1654340
Simons Foundation
828078
Simons Foundation
651444
Department of Energy (DOE)
DE-SC0011632
Cornell University
NSF
DMR-1920434

Dates

Created
2023-08-14
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2023-08-14
Created from EPrint's last_modified field