A symmetry principle for topological quantum order (Q1018280)

Topological quantum order (TQO) is a new paradigm which aims to extend the Landau symmetry-breaking framework. The purpose of the authors is to investigate many topics which occur very often in the study of TQO, and to this end they introduce a concept of GLS's symmetries which lie in the midway between local standard gauge symmetries and global symmetries: one analyzes TQO from the point of view of GLS. This very long paper covers a very large number of topics. For instance: the physical properties of systems endowed with GLS, relations between GLS's and TQO, special states and GSs of the Kitaev's and related models, general equivalence in the spectral structure between TQO systems and systems with standard local orders, entanglement entropy, analogy between TQO and topology of graph, one-dimensional string and higher-dimensional brane correlations, relation between ground state degeneracy, topology and robustness. A long set of appendixes contains the mathematical details.