We present simple lattice realizations of symmetry-protected topological phases with
q-form global symmetries where charged excitations have
q spatial dimensions. Specifically, we construct
d space-dimensional models supported on a
(d+1)-colorable graph by using a family of unitary phase gates, known as multiqubit control-
Z gates in quantum information community. In our construction, charged excitations of different dimensionality may coexist and form a short-range entangled state which is protected by symmetry operators of different dimensionality. Nontriviality of proposed models, in a sense of quantum circuit complexity, is confirmed by studying protected boundary modes, gauged models, and corresponding gapped domain walls. We also comment on applications of our construction to quantum error-correcting codes, and discuss corresponding fault-tolerant logical gates.
We investigate boundaries of 3D color codes and provide a systematic classification into 101 distinct boundary types, including two novel classes. The first class consists of 1 boundary and is generated by sweeping the codimension-1 (2D) T -domain wall across the system and attaching it to the X -boundary that condenses only magnetic fluxes. Since the T -domain wall cannot condense on the X -boundary, a new magic boundary is produced, where the boundary stabilizers contain XS -stabilizers going beyond the conventional Pauli stabilizer formalism, and hence contains 'magic'. Neither electric nor magnetic excitations can condense on such a magic boundary, and only the composite of the magnetic flux and codimension-2 (1D) S -domain wall can condense on it, which makes the magic boundary going beyond the classification of the Lagrangian subgroup. The second class consists of 70 boundaries and is generated by sweeping the S -domain wall across a codimension-1 submanifold and attaching it to the boundary. This generates a codimension-2 (1D) nested boundary at the intersection. We also connect these novel boundaries to their previously discovered counterpart in the Z23 gauge theory, equivalent to three copies of 3D toric codes, where the S and T domain walls correspond to gauged symmetry-protected topological (SPT) defects. New boundaries are produced whenever the corresponding symmetry of the SPT defect remains unbroken on the boundary. Applications of the magic boundaries include implementing fault-tolerant non-Clifford logical gates, e.g., in the context of fractal topological codes.
Symmetry-protected topological phases (SPT) are short-range entangled gapped states protected by global symmetry. Nontrivial SPT phases cannot be adiabatically connected to the trivial disordered state (or atomic insulator) as long as certain global symmetry
G is unbroken. At low energies, most of the two-dimensional SPTs with Abelian symmetry can be described by topological quantum field theory (TQFT) of the multicomponent Chern-Simons type. However, in contrast to the fractional quantum Hall effect where TQFT can give rise to interesting bulk anyons, TQFT for SPTs only supports trivial bulk excitations. The essential question in TQFT descriptions for SPTs is to understand how the global symmetry is implemented in the partition function. In this paper, we systematically study TQFT of three-dimensional SPTs with unitary Abelian symmetry (e.g., ${\mathbb{Z}}_{{N}_{1}}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{\mathbb{Z}}_{{N}_{2}}\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}...$). In addition to the usual multicomponent
BF topological term at level-1, we find that there are new topological terms with quantized coefficients (e.g., ${a}^{1}\ensuremath{\wedge}{a}^{2}\ensuremath{\wedge}d{a}^{2}$ and ${a}^{1}\ensuremath{\wedge}{a}^{2}\ensuremath{\wedge}{a}^{3}\ensuremath{\wedge}{a}^{4}$) in TQFT actions, where
a1,a2,... are 1-form U(1) gauge fields. These additional topological terms cannot be adiabatically turned off as long as
G is unbroken. By investigating symmetry transformations for the TQFT partition function, we end up with the classification of SPTs that is consistent with the well-known group cohomology approach. We also discuss how to gauge the global symmetry and possible TQFT descriptions of Dijkgraaf-Witten gauge theory.
Symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases are gapped short-range-entangled quantum phases with a symmetry
G. They can all be smoothly connected to the same trivial product state if we break the symmetry. The Haldane phase of spin-1 chain is the first example of SPT phases which is protected by
SO(3) spin rotation symmetry. The topological insulator is another example of SPT phases which are protected by
U(1) and time-reversal symmetries. In this paper, we show that interacting bosonic SPT phases can be systematically described by group cohomology theory: Distinct
d-dimensional bosonic SPT phases with on-site symmetry
G (which may contain antiunitary time-reversal symmetry) can be labeled by the elements in
H1+d[G,UT(1)], the Borel
(1+d)-group-cohomology classes of
G over the
G module
UT(1). Our theory, which leads to explicit ground-state wave functions and commuting projector Hamiltonians, is based on a new type of topological term that generalizes the topological $\ensuremath{\theta}$ term in continuous nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models to lattice nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models. The boundary excitations of the nontrivial SPT phases are described by lattice nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models with a nonlocal Lagrangian term that generalizes the Wess-Zumino-Witten term for continuous nonlinear $\ensuremath{\sigma}$ models. As a result, the symmetry
G must be realized as a non-on-site symmetry for the low-energy boundary excitations, and those boundary states must be gapless or degenerate. As an application of our result, we can use ${\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[U(1)\ensuremath{\rtimes}{Z}_{2}^{T},{U}_{T}(1)]$ to obtain interacting bosonic topological insulators (protected by time reversal
Z2T and boson number conservation), which contain one nontrivial phase in one-dimensional (1D) or 2D and three in 3D. We also obtain interacting bosonic topological superconductors (protected by time-reversal symmetry only), in term of
H1+d[Z2T,UT(1)], which contain one nontrivial phase in odd spatial dimensions and none for even dimensions. Our result is much more general than the above two examples, since it is for any symmetry group. For example, we can use ${\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[U(1)\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}{Z}_{2}^{T},{U}_{T}(1)]$ to construct the SPT phases of integer spin systems with time-reversal and
U(1) spin rotation symmetry, which contain three nontrivial SPT phases in 1D, none in 2D, and seven in 3D. Even more generally, we find that the different bosonic symmetry breaking short-range-entangled phases are labeled by the following three mathematical objects: $({G}_{H},{G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}},{\mathcal{H}}^{1+d}[{G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}},{U}_{T}(1)])$, where
GH is the symmetry group of the Hamiltonian and ${G}_{\ensuremath{\Psi}}$ the symmetry group of the ground states.
We discuss physical constructions and the boundary properties of various symmetry-protected topological phases that involve 1-form symmetries from one spatial dimension to four spatial dimensions (
4d). For example, the prototype three-dimensional (
3d) boundary state of
4d SPT states involving 1-form symmetries can be either a gapless photon phase (quantum electrodynamics) or gapped topological order enriched by 1-form symmetries; that is, the loop excitations of these topological orders carry nontrivial 1-form symmetry charges. This study also serves the purpose of diagnosing anomalies of
3d states of matter. Connection between SPT states with 1-form symmetries and condensed-matter systems such as quantum dimer models at one lower dimension will also be discussed. Whether a quantum dimer model can have a trivial gapped phase depends on the nature of its corresponding bulk state in one higher dimension.
Gapped interfaces (and boundaries) of two-dimensional (2D) Abelian topological phases are shown to support a remarkably rich sequence of 1D symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states. We show that such interfaces can provide a physical interpretation for the corrections to the topological entanglement entropy of a 2D state with Abelian topological order found by J. Cano, T. L. Hughes, and M. Mulligan [Phys. Rev. B 92, 075104 (2015)]. The topological entanglement entropy decomposes as $\ensuremath{\gamma}={\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{a}+{\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{s}$, where ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{a}>0$ only depends on universal topological properties of the 2D state, while a correction ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{s}>0$ signals the emergence of the 1D SPT state that is produced by interactions along the entanglement cut and provides a direct measure of the stabilizing symmetry of the resulting SPT state. A correspondence is established between the possible values of ${\ensuremath{\gamma}}_{s}$ associated with a given interface---which is named the ``boundary topological entanglement sequence''---and classes of 1D SPT states. We show that symmetry-preserving domain walls along such 1D interfaces (or boundaries) generally host localized parafermion-like excitations that are stable to local symmetry-preserving perturbations.