Emergent generalized symmetry and maximal symmetry-topological-order

arXiv2212.14432MaRDI QIDQ6422012FDOQ6422012

Xiao-Gang Wen, Arkya Chatterjee, Wenjie Ji

Publication date: 29 December 2022

Abstract: A gapless liquid state can have many different emergent symmetries, which can be viewed as invariants or fingerprints of the gapless state. The emergent symmetries can be anomaly-free (classified by groups or higher groups), anomalous (classified by groups plus group cocycles), or even beyond group and beyond anomalous. To understand all those emergent symmetries in an unified way, it is better to put all the emergent symmetries of the state together, and refer to the maximal emergent symmetry as maximal categorical symmetry. A systematic understanding of those emergent symmetries is achieved after realizing that categorical symmetry is nothing but (non-invertible) gravitational anomaly, which is the same as topological order in one higher dimension if the categorical symmetry is finite. The above description of maximal categorical symmetry is just a vague idea. In this paper, we propose a precise way to define the notion of maximal categorical symmetry. For example, the 1+1D Ising critical point has a maximal categorical symmetry described by the 2+1D doulbe-Ising topological order. Such a categorical symmetry is not associated to any anomaly-free symmetry. The maximal categorical symmetry is a very detailed characterization of the gapless state (much more than the projective symmetry group introduced before for the same purpose). It may be close to the full characterization of the local low energy properties of gapless liquid state. Therefore, the study of maximal categorical symmetry may be a key to gaining a systematic understanding or even a classification of gapless liquid states, up to local low energy equivalence, where two gapless states are local low energy equivalent if they differ by stacking a gapped state.

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