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 prove that all eigenstates of many-body localized symmetry-protected topological systems with time reversal symmetry have fourfold degenerate entanglement spectra in the thermodynamic limit. To that end, we employ unitary quantum circuits where the number of sites the gates act on grows linearly with the system size. We find that the corresponding matrix product operator representation has similar local symmetries as matrix product ground states of symmetry-protected topological phases. Those local symmetries give rise to a
Z2 topological index, which is robust against arbitrary perturbations so long as they do not break time reversal symmetry or drive the system out of the fully many-body localized phase.
Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases in quantum spin chains are distinguished by topological indices. Ogata's operator-algebraic indices apply to a broad range of symmetry classes without requiring continuous symmetry, whereas the elementary twist index of Tasaki requires
U(1) symmetry. We prove their equivalence in the common setting of integer-spin chains with on-site
U(1)⋊Z2 symmetry and a symmetric locally-unique gapped ground state, without assuming translation invariance or a matrix product representation. A charge-fluctuation estimate yields a strong-limit construction of half-chain rotations with their phases fixed. An exact group commutator identity then identifies the Ogata index with the limit of local twist expectations and gives an explicit error bound. This provides a computable formula for the index when a lower bound on the gap and the relevant ground-state expectations are available. Combining the equivalence with a recent boundary-field gap theorem of OpenAI and our earlier twist-index calculation, we obtain a spin-rotation-invariant locally-unique gapped ground state of the infinite
S=1 antiferromagnetic Heisenberg chain with both indices equal to
−1, without assuming infinite-volume uniqueness.
The author formulated the problem and proposed the basic strategy, while ChatGPT Astra made substantial contributions to the development of the proof.