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arXiv:2204.06589

The boundaries of 2+1D fermionic topological orders

Chang-Han Chen, Xiao-Gang Wen

Published Apr 13, 2022• 1 citation
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Abstract

$2+1$D bosonic topological orders can be characterized by the $S,T$ matrices that encode the statistics of topological excitations. In particular, the $S,T$ matrices can be used to systematically obtain the gapped boundaries of bosonic topological orders. Such an approach, however, does not naively apply to fermionic topological orders (FTOs). In this work, we propose a systematic approach to obtain the gapped boundaries of $2+1$D abelian FTOs. The main trick is to construct a bosonic extension in which the fermionic excitation is "condensed" to form the associated FTOs. Here we choose the parent bosonic topological order to be the $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order, which indeed has a fermionic excitation. Such a construction allows us to find an explicit correspondence between abelian FTOs (described by odd $K$-matrix $K_F$) and the "fermion-" condensed $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological orders (described by even $K$-matrix $K_B$). This provides a systematic algorithm to obtain the modular covariant boundary partition functions as well as the boundary topological excitations of abelian FTOs. For example, the $ν=1-\frac{1}{m}$ Laughlin's states have exactly one type of gapped boundary when $m$ is a square, whose boundary excitations form a $\mathbb{Z}_{2}\times\mathbb{Z}_{\sqrt{m}}$ fusion ring. Our approach can be easily generalized to obtain gapped and gapless boundaries of non-abelian fermionic topological orders.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2204.06589

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Recently we conjectured that a certain set of universal topological quantities characterize topological order in any dimension. Those quantities can be extracted from the universal overlap of the ground-state wave functions. For systems with gapped boundaries, these quantities are representations of the mapping class group MCG(M)\mathtt{MCG}(\mathcal{M})MCG(M) of the space manifold M\mathcal{M}M on which the systems live. We will here consider simple examples in three dimensions and give physical interpretation of these quantities, related to the fusion algebra and statistics of particles and string excitations. In particular, we will consider dimensional reduction from 3+1D to 2+1D, and show how the induced 2+1D topological data contain information on the fusion and the braiding of non-Abelian string excitations in 3D. These universal quantities generalize the well-known modular SSS and TTT matrices to any dimension.
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