Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases exhibit nontrivial short-ranged entanglement protected by symmetry and cannot be adiabatically connected to trivial product states while preserving the symmetry. In contrast, intrinsic topological phases do not need ordinary symmetry to stabilize them and their ground states exhibit long-range entanglement. It is known that for a given symmetry group
G, the 2D SPT phase protected by
G is dual to the 2D topological phase exemplified by the twisted quantum double model ${D}^{\ensuremath{\omega}}(G)$ via gauging the global symmetry
G. Recently it was realized that such a general gauging map can be implemented by some local unitaries and local measurements when
G is a finite, solvable group. Here, we review the general approach to gauging a $G\text{\ensuremath{-}}\mathrm{SPT}$ starting from a fixed-point ground-state wave function and applying a
N-step gauging procedure. We provide an in-depth analysis of the intermediate states emerging during the
N-step gauging and provide tools to measure and identify the emerging symmetry-enriched topological order (SET) of these states. We construct the generic lattice parent Hamiltonians for these intermediate states and show that they form an entangled superposition of a twisted quantum double (TQD) with an SPT-ordered state. Notably, we show that they can be connected to the TQD through a finite-depth, local quantum circuit which does not respect the global symmetry of the SET order. We introduce the so-called symmetry branch line operators and show that they can be used to extract the symmetry fractionalization classes (SFC) and symmetry defectification classes (SDC) of the SET phases with the input data
G and $[\ensuremath{\omega}]\ensuremath{\in}{H}^{3}(G,U(1))$ of the pregauged SPT-ordered state. We illustrate the procedure of preparing and characterizing the emerging SET-ordered states for some Abelian and non-Abelian examples such as dihedral groups
Dn and the quaternion group
Q8.
We consider topological phases in periodically driven (Floquet) systems exhibiting many-body localization, protected by a symmetry
G. We argue for a general correspondence between such phases and topological phases of undriven systems protected by symmetry $\mathbb{Z}\ensuremath{\rtimes}G$ where the additional
Z accounts for the discrete time-translation symmetry. Thus, for example, the bosonic phases in
d spatial dimensions without intrinsic topological order [symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases] are classified by the cohomology group ${H}^{d+1}[\mathbb{Z}\ensuremath{\rtimes}G,\mathrm{U}(1)]$. For unitary symmetries, we interpret the additional resulting Floquet phases in terms of the lower-dimensional SPT phases that are pumped to the boundary during one time step. These results also imply the existence of novel symmetry-enriched topological (SET) orders protected solely by the periodicity of the drive.
Intrinsically gapless symmetry-protected topological phases (igSPT) are gapless systems with SPT edge states with properties that could not arise in a gapped system with the same symmetry and dimensionality. igSPT states arise from gapless systems in which an anomaly in the low-energy (infrared) symmetry group emerges from an extended anomaly-free microscopic (ultraviolet) symmetry. We construct a general framework for constructing lattice models for igSPT phases with emergent anomalies classified by group cohomology, and establish a direct connection between the emergent anomaly, group-extension, and topological edge states by gauging the extending symmetry. In many examples, the edge-state protection has a physically transparent mechanism: the extending UV symmetry operations pump lower-dimensional SPTs onto the igSPT edge, tuning the edge to a (multi)critical point between different SPTs protected by the IR symmetry. In two- and three-dimensional systems, an additional possibility is that the emergent anomaly can be satisfied by an anomalous symmetry-enriched topological order, which we call a quotient-symmetry-enriched topological order (QSET) that is sharply distinguished from the nonanomalous UV SETs by an edge phase transition. We construct exactly solvable lattice models with QSET order.