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arXiv:2206.12791 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Emergent fermionic gauge theory and foliated fracton order in the Chamon model

Wilbur E. Shirley, Xu Liu, Arpit Dua

Published Jan 20, 2023• 9 citations
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Abstract

The Chamon model is an exactly solvable spin Hamiltonian exhibiting nontrivial fracton order. In this paper, we dissect two distinct aspects of the model. First, we show that it exhibits an emergent fractonic gauge theory coupled to a fermionic subsystem symmetry-protected topological state under four stacks of ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ planar symmetries. Second, we show that the Chamon model hosts 4-foliated fracton order by describing an entanglement renormalization group transformation that exfoliates four separate stacks of 2D toric codes from the bulk system.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.107.035136

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The Chamon model is an exactly solvable spin Hamiltonian exhibiting nontrivial fracton order. In this paper, we dissect two distinct aspects of the model. First, we show that it exhibits an emergent fractonic gauge theory coupled to a fermionic subsystem symmetry-protected topological state under four stacks of Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ planar symmetries. Second, we show that the Chamon model hosts 4-foliated fracton order by describing an entanglement renormalization group transformation that exfoliates four separate stacks of 2D toric codes from the bulk system.
We consider fermionic systems in which fermion parity is conserved within rigid subsystems, and describe an explicit procedure for gauging such subsystem fermion parity symmetries to obtain bosonic spin Hamiltonians. We show that gauging planar or fractal subsystem fermion parity symmetry in three spatial dimensions gives rise to a plethora of exactly solvable spin models exhibiting novel gapped fractonic orders characterized by emergent fermionic gauge theory. The low energy excitations of these models include fractional quasiparticles with constrained mobility and emergent fermionic statistics. We illustrate this phenomenon through a series of examples including fermionic analogs of both foliated fracton phases and fractal spin liquids. We find that the foliated analogs actually exhibit the same fractonic order as their bosonic counterparts, while this is not generally the case for fermionic fractal spin liquids.
There are now many examples of gapped fracton models, which are defined by the presence of restricted-mobility excitations above the quantum ground state. However, the theory of fracton orders remains in its early stages, and the complex landscape of examples is far from being mapped out. Here we introduce the class of planon-modular (p-modular) fracton orders, a relatively simple yet still rich class of quantum orders that encompasses several well-known examples of type I fracton order. The defining property is that any non-trivial point-like excitation can be detected by braiding with planons. From this definition, we uncover a significant amount of general structure, including the assignment of a natural number (dubbed the weight) to each excitation of a p-modular fracton order. We identify simple new phase invariants, some of which are based on weight, which can easily be used to compare and distinguish different fracton orders. We also study entanglement renormalization group (RG) flows of p-modular fracton orders, establishing a close connection with foliated RG. We illustrate our general results with an analysis of several exactly solvable fracton models that we show to realize p-modular fracton orders, including Z_n versions of the X-cube, anisotropic, checkerboard, 4-planar X-cube and four color cube (FCC) models. We show that each of these models is p-modular and compute its phase invariants. We also show that each example admits a foliated RG at the level of its non-trivial excitations, which is a new result for the 4-planar X-cube and FCC models. We show that the Z_2 FCC model is not a stack of other better-studied models, but predict that the Z_n FCC model with n odd is a stack of 10 4-planar X-cubes, possibly plus decoupled layers of 2d toric code. We also show that the Z_n checkerboard model for n odd is a stack of three anisotropic models.
In the study of three-dimensional gapped models, two-dimensional gapped states should be considered as a free resource. This is the basic idea underlying the notion of ``foliated fracton order'' proposed in Shirley et al. [Phys. Rev. X 8, 031051 (2018)]. We have found that many of the known type-I fracton models, although they appear very different, have the same foliated fracton order, known as ``X-cube'' order. In this paper, we identify three-dimensional fracton models with different kinds of foliated fracton order. Whereas the X-cube order corresponds to the gauge theory of a simple paramagnet with subsystem planar symmetry, the different orders correspond to twisted versions of the gauge theory for which the system prior to gauging has nontrivial order protected by the planar subsystem symmetry. We present constructions of the twisted models and demonstrate that they possess nontrivial order by studying their fractional excitation contents.
We establish the presence of foliated fracton order in the Majorana checkerboard model. In particular, we describe an entanglement renormalization group transformation which utilizes toric code layers as resources of entanglement and furthermore discuss entanglement signatures and fractional excitations of the model. In fact, we give an exact local unitary equivalence between the Majorana checkerboard model and the semionic X-cube model augmented with decoupled fermionic modes. This mapping demonstrates that the model lies within the X-cube foliated fracton phase.
We investigate the properties of foliated gauge fields and construct several foliated field theories in 3+1d that describe foliated fracton orders both with and without matter, including the recent hybrid fracton models. These field theories describe Abelian or non-Abelian gauge theories coupled to foliated gauge fields, and they fall into two classes of models that we call the electric models and the magnetic models. We show that these two classes of foliated field theories enjoy a duality. We also construct a model (using foliated gauge fields and an exactly solvable lattice Hamiltonian model) for a subsystem-symmetry protected topological (SSPT) phase, which is analogous to a one-form symmetry protected topological phase, with the subsystem symmetry acting on codimension-two subregions. We construct the corresponding gauged SSPT phase as a foliated two-form gauge theory. Some instances of the gauged SSPT phase are a variant of the X-cube model with the same ground state degeneracy and the same fusion, but different particle statistics.
In this work, we show that the checkerboard model exhibits the phenomenon of foliated fracton order. We introduce a renormalization-group transformation for the model that utilizes toric code bilayers as an entanglement resource and show how to extend the model to general three-dimensional manifolds. Furthermore, we use universal properties distilled from the structure of fractional excitations and ground-state entanglement to characterize the foliated fracton phase and find that it is the same as two copies of the X-cube model. Indeed, we demonstrate that the checkerboard model can be transformed into two copies of the X-cube model via an adiabatic deformation.