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arXiv:2501.07935

Exotic massive fermionic systems with huge vacuum degeneracy at boundaries

Hiroki Kawakami, Satoshi Yamaguchi

Published Jan 14, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We investigate a massive non-relativistic fermionic system exhibiting exotic features. When the mass parameter is set to zero, the system acquires the fermionic subsystem symmetry. Introducing the mass term explicitly breaks this symmetry, resulting in a trivially gapped system in the absence of boundaries. We demonstrate that with the introduction of boundaries, the system remains gapped, but it has a huge vacuum degeneracy. The residual entropy is proportional to the area of the boundary.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2501.07935

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We investigate a massive non-relativistic fermionic system exhibiting exotic features. When the mass parameter is set to zero, the system acquires the fermionic subsystem symmetry. Introducing the mass term explicitly breaks this symmetry, resulting in a trivially gapped system in the absence of boundaries. We demonstrate that with the introduction of boundaries, the system remains gapped, but it has a huge vacuum degeneracy. The residual entropy is proportional to the area of the boundary.
Abstract We construct a purely fermionic system with spontaneously broken supersymmetry that shares the common feature with a fracton phase of matter. Our model is gapless due to the Nambu-Goldstone mechanism. It shows a ground-state degeneracy with the “Area-law” entropy due to fermionic subsystem symmetries. In the strongly coupled limit, it becomes a variant of the Nicolai model, and we conjecture that the ground-state degeneracy shows the “Volume-law” entropy. Gauging the fermionic subsystem symmetry has an t’Hooft anomaly by itself, but the would-be gauged theory may possess a fermionic defect that is immobile in certain spatial directions.
Symmetric mass generation (SMG) is a mechanism to give gapless fermions a mass gap by nonperturbative interactions without generating any fermion bilinear condensation. The previous studies of SMG have been limited to Dirac/Weyl/Majorana fermions with zero Fermi volume in the free fermion limit. In this paper, we generalize the concept of SMG to Fermi liquid (FL) with a finite Fermi volume and discuss how to gap out the Fermi surfaces (FSs) by interactions without breaking the U(1) loop group symmetry or developing topological orders. We provide examples of FS SMG in both (1+1)(1+1)(1+1)-dimensional [(1+1)D][(1+1)\mathrm{D}][(1+1)D] and (2+1)(2+1)(2+1)-dimensional FL systems when several FSs together cancel the FS anomaly. However, the U(1) loop group symmetry in these cases is still restrictive enough to rule out all possible fermion bilinear gapping terms, such that a nonperturbative interaction mechanism is the only way to gap out the FSs. This symmetric FS reconstruction is in contrast to the conventional symmetry-breaking gapping mechanism in the FL. As a side product, our model provides a pristine one-dimensional lattice regularization for the (1+1)D(1+1)\mathrm{D}(1+1)D U(1) symmetric chiral fermion model (e.g., the 3-4-5-0 model) by utilizing a lattice translation symmetry as an emergent U(1) symmetry at low energy. This opens up the opportunity for efficient numerical simulations of chiral fermions in their own dimensions without introducing mirror fermions under the domain wall fermion construction.
Abstract In this work we consider general fermion systems in two spatial dimensions, both with and without charge conservation symmetry, which realize a non-trivial fermionic topological order with only Abelian anyons. We address the question of precisely how these quantum phases differ from their bosonic counterparts, both in terms of their edge physics and in the way one would identify them in numerics. As in previous works, we answer these questions by studying the theory obtained after gauging the global fermion parity symmetry, which turns out to have a special and simple structure. Using this structure, a minimal scheme is outlined for how to numerically identify a general Abelian fermionic topological order, without making use of fermion number conservation. Along the way, some subtleties of the momentum polarization technique are discussed. Regarding the edge physics, it is shown that the gauged theory can have a (bosonic) gapped boundary to the vacuum if and only if the ungauged fermion theory has a gapped boundary as well.
Abstract Boundary conditions for a massless Dirac fermion in 2+1 dimensions where the space is a half-plane are discussed in detail. It is argued that linear boundary conditions that leave the Hamiltonian Hermitian generically break C P and T symmetries as well as Lorentz and conformal symmetry. We show that there is essentially one special case where a single species of fermion has C PT and the full Poincare and conformal symmetry of the boundary. We show that, with doubled fermions, there is a second special case which respects C PT but still violates Lorentz and conformal symmetry. This second special case is essentially the unique boundary condition where the Dirac operator has fermion zero mode edge states. We discuss how the edge states lead to exotic representations of scale, phase and translation symmetries and how imposing a symmetry requirement leads to edge ferromagnetism of the system. We prove that the exotic ferromagnetic representations are indeed carried by the ground states of the system perturbed by a class of interaction Hamiltonians which includes the non-relativistic Coulomb interaction.
The non-perturbative constraints imposed by intrinsic fermionic non-invertible symmetries in 1+1 dimensional gapped systems remain largely unexplored. In this letter, we propose the superstrip algebra as a unified framework to catalog the categorical symmetry data in a massive fermionic model. The algebra and its representations explicitly encode the vacuum structure, soliton degeneracies, and their quantum numbers. As a demonstration, we apply this framework to the N=2\mathcal N=2N=2 minimal models with their least relevant deformation. We show that this specific deformation alone preserves a non-invertible superfusion category, a fermionic variant of SU(2)k\text{SU}(2)_kSU(2)k​ known to underlie the ADEADEADE classification of critical theories. Its superstrip algebra then accounts for the origin of the resulting ADEADEADE-type soliton spectrum and their fractional fermion number. Although our primary examples are supersymmetric and integrable, our framework itself relies on neither property, providing a new powerful tool for studying a broad class of strongly-coupled fermionic systems.
Lattice regularization of chiral fermions has been a long-standing problem in physics. In this Letter, we present the density matrix renormalization group simulation of the 3-4-5-0 model of (1+1)D chiral fermions with an anomaly-free chiral U(1) symmetry, which contains two left-moving and two right-moving fermions carrying U(1) charges 3,4 and 5,0, respectively. Following the Wang-Wen chiral fermion model, we realize the chiral fermions and their mirror partners on the opposite boundaries of a thin strip of (2+1)D lattice model of multilayer Chern insulator, whose finite width implies the quantum system is effectively (1+1)D. By introducing two sets of carefully designed six-fermion local interactions to the mirror sector only, we demonstrate that the mirror fermions can be gapped out by the interaction beyond a critical strength without breaking the chiral U(1) symmetry, via the symmetric mass generation mechanism. We show that the interaction-driven gapping transition is in the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless universality class. We determine the evolution of Luttinger parameters before the transition, which confirms that the transition happens exactly at the point when the interaction term becomes marginal. As the mirror sector is gapped after the transition, we check that the fermions in the light chiral fermion sector remain gapless, which provides the desired lattice regularization of chiral fermions.