arXiv subjects

Liang Kong

Publications and source records attributed to Liang Kong.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Algebraic higher symmetry and categorical symmetry -- a holographic and entanglement view of symmetry

We introduce the notion of algebraic higher symmetry, which generalizes higher symmetry and is beyond higher group. We show that an algebraic higher symmetry in a bosonic system in $n$-dimensional space is characterized and classified by a local fusion $n$-category. We find another way to describe algebraic higher symmetry by restricting to symmetric sub Hilbert space where symmetry transformations all become trivial. In this case, algebraic higher symmetry can be fully characterized by a non-invertible gravitational anomaly (i.e. an topological order in one higher dimension). Thus we also refer to non-invertible gravitational anomaly as categorical symmetry to stress its connection to symmetry. This provides a holographic and entanglement view of symmetries. For a system with a categorical symmetry, its gapped state must spontaneously break part (not all) of the symmetry, and the state with the full symmetry must be gapless. Using such a holographic point of view, we obtain (1) the gauging of the algebraic higher symmetry; (2) the classification of anomalies for an algebraic higher symmetry; (3) the equivalence between classes of systems, with different (potentially anomalous) algebraic higher symmetries or different sets of low energy excitations, as long as they have the same categorical symmetry; (4) the classification of gapped liquid phases for bosonic/fermionic systems with a categorical symmetry, as gapped boundaries of a topological order in one higher dimension (that corresponds to the categorical symmetry). This classification includes symmetry protected trivial (SPT) orders and symmetry enriched topological (SET) orders with an algebraic higher symmetry.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

Classification of topological phases with finite internal symmetries in all dimensions

We develop a mathematical theory of symmetry protected trivial (SPT) orders and anomaly-free symmetry enriched topological (SET) orders in all dimensions via two different approaches with an emphasis on the second approach. The first approach is to gauge the symmetry in the same dimension by adding topological excitations as it was done in the 2d case, in which the gauging process is mathematically described by the minimal modular extensions of unitary braided fusion 1-categories. This 2d result immediately generalizes to all dimensions except in 1d, which is treated with special care. The second approach is to use the 1-dimensional higher bulk of the SPT/SET order and the boundary-bulk relation. This approach also leads us to a precise mathematical description and a classification of SPT/SET orders in all dimensions. The equivalence of these two approaches, together with known physical results, provides us with many precise mathematical predictions.

math-ph↗

arXiv2020

A relation between chiral central charge and ground state degeneracy in 2+1-dimensional topological orders

A bosonic topological order on $d$-dimensional closed space $Σ^d$ may have degenerate ground states. The space $Σ^d$ with different shapes (different metrics) form a moduli space ${\cal M}_{Σ^d}$. Thus the degenerate ground states on every point in the moduli space ${\cal M}_{Σ^d}$ form a complex vector bundle over ${\cal M}_{Σ^d}$. It was suggested that the collection of such vector bundles for $d$-dimensional closed spaces of all topologies completely characterizes the topological order. Using such a point of view, we propose a direct relation between two seemingly unrelated properties of 2+1-dimensional topological orders: (1) the chiral central charge $c$ that describes the many-body density of states for edge excitations (or more precisely the thermal Hall conductance of the edge), (2) the ground state degeneracy $D_g$ on closed genus $g$ surface. We show that $c D_g/2 \in \mathbb{Z},\ g\geq 3$ for bosonic topological orders. We explicitly checked the validity of this relation for over 140 simple topological orders. For fermionic topological orders, let $D_{g,σ}^{e}$ ($D_{g,σ}^{o}$) be the degeneracy with even (odd) number of fermions for genus-$g$ surface with spin structure $σ$. Then we have $2c D_{g,σ}^{e} \in \mathbb{Z}$ and $2c D_{g,σ}^{o} \in \mathbb{Z}$ for $g\geq 3$.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

A mathematical theory of gapless edges of 2d topological orders. Part II

This is the second part of a two-part work on the unified mathematical theory of gapped and gapless edges of 2+1D topological orders. In Part I, we have developed the mathematical theory of chiral gapless edges. In Part II, we study boundary-bulk relation and non-chiral gapless edges. In particular, we explain how the notion of the center of an enriched monoidal category naturally emerges from the boundary-bulk relation. After the study of 0+1D gapless walls, we give the complete boundary-bulk relation for 2+1D topological orders with chiral gapless edges (including gapped edges) and 0d walls between edges. This relation is stated precisely and proved rigorously as a monoidal equivalence, which generalizes the functoriality of the usual Drinfeld center to an enriched setting. We also develop the mathematical theory of non-chiral gapless edges and 0+1D walls, and explain how to gap out certain non-chiral 1+1D gapless edges and 0+1D gapless walls categorically. In the end, we show that all anomaly-free 1+1D boundary-bulk rational CFT's can be recovered from 2d topological orders with chiral gapless edges via a dimensional reduction process. This provides physical meanings to some mysterious connections between mathematical results in fusion categories and those in rational CFT's.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

A mathematical theory of gapless edges of 2d topological orders. Part I

This is the first part of a two-part work on a unified mathematical theory of gapped and gapless edges of 2d topological orders. We analyze all the possible observables on the 1+1D world sheet of a chiral gapless edge of a 2d topological order, and show that these observables form an enriched unitary fusion category, the Drinfeld center of which is precisely the unitary modular tensor category associated to the bulk. This mathematical description of a chiral gapless edge automatically includes that of a gapped edge (i.e. a unitary fusion category) as a special case. Therefore, we obtain a unified mathematical description and a classification of both gapped and chiral gapless edges of a given 2d topological order. In the process of our analysis, we encounter an interesting and reoccurring phenomenon: spatial fusion anomaly, which leads us to propose the Principle of Universality at RG fixed points for all quantum field theories. Our theory also implies that all chiral gapless edges can be obtained from a so-called topological Wick rotations. This fact leads us to propose, at the end of this work, a surprising correspondence between gapped and gapless phases in all dimensions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2020

The center of monoidal 2-categories in 3+1D Dijkgraaf-Witten Theory

In this work, for a finite group $G$ and a 4-cocycle $ω\in Z^4(G, \mathbf{k}^\times)$, we compute explicitly the center of the monoidal 2-category $\operatorname{2Vec}_G^ω$ of $ω$-twisted $G$-graded 1-categories of finite dimensional $\mathbf{k}$-vector spaces. This center gives a precise mathematical description of the topological defects in the associated 3+1D Dijkgraaf-Witten TQFT. We prove that this center is a braided monoidal 2-category with a trivial sylleptic center.

math.QA↗

arXiv2019

Pointed Drinfeld center functor

In this work, using the functoriality of Drinfeld center of fusion categories, we generalize an earlier result on the functoriality of full center of simple separable algebras in a fixed fusion category to all fusion categories. This generalization produces a new center functor, which involves both Drinfeld center and full center and will be called the pointed Drinfeld center functor. We prove that this pointed Drinfeld center functor is a symmetric monoidal equivalence. It turns out that this functor provides a precise and rather complete mathematical formulation of the boundary-bulk relation of 1+1D rational conformal field theories (RCFT). In this process, we solve an old problem of computing the fusion of two 0D (or 1D) wall CFT's along a non-trivial 1+1D bulk RCFT.

math.QA↗

arXiv2019

Semisimple and separable algebras in multi-fusion categories

We give a classification of semisimple and separable algebras in a multi-fusion category over an arbitrary field in analogy to Wedderben-Artin theorem in classical algebras. It turns out that, if the multi-fusion category admits a semisimple Drinfeld center, the only obstruction to the separability of a semisimple algebra arises from inseparable field extensions as in classical algebras. Among others, we show that a division algebra is separable if and only if it has a nonvanishing dimension.

math.QA↗

arXiv2019

Gapped domain walls between 2+1D topologically ordered states

The 2+1D topological order can be characterized by the mapping-class-group representations for Riemann surfaces of genus-1, genus-2, etc. In this paper, we use those representations to determine the possible gapped boundaries of a 2+1D topological order, as well as the domain walls between two topological orders. We find that mapping-class-group representations for both genus-1 and genus-2 surfaces are needed to determine the gapped domain walls and boundaries. Our systematic theory is based on the fixed-point partition functions for the walls (or the boundaries), which completely characterize the gapped domain walls (or the boundaries). The mapping-class-group representations give rise to conditions that must be satisfied by the fixed-point partition functions, which leads to a systematic theory. Such conditions can be viewed as bulk topological order determining the (non-invertible) gravitational anomaly at the domain wall, and our theory can be viewed as finding all types of the gapped domain wall given a (non-invertible) gravitational anomaly. We also developed a systematic theory of gapped domain walls (boundaries) based on the structure coefficients of condensable algebras.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2019

A topological phase transition on the edge of the 2d $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order

The unified mathematical theory of gapped and gapless edges of 2d topological orders was developed by two of the authors. It provides a powerful tool to study pure edge topological phase transitions on the edges of 2d topological orders (without altering the bulks). In particular, it implies that the critical points are described by enriched fusion categories. In this work, we illustrate this idea in a concrete example: the 2d $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order. In particular, we construct an enriched fusion category, which describes a gappable non-chiral gapless edge of the 2d $\mathbb{Z}_2$ topological order; then use an explicit lattice model construction to realize the critical point and, at the same time, all the ingredients of this enriched fusion category.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

Efficient Machine Learning Representations of Surface Code with Boundaries, Defects, Domain Walls and Twists

Machine learning representations of many-body quantum states have recently been introduced as an ansatz to describe the ground states and unitary evolutions of many-body quantum systems. We explore one of the most important representations, restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) representation, in stabilizer formalism. We give the general method of constructing RBM representation for stabilizer code states and find the exact RBM representation for several types of stabilizer groups with the number of hidden neurons equal or less than the number of visible neurons, which indicates that the representation is extremely efficient. Then we analyze the surface code with boundaries, defects, domain walls and twists in full detail and find that all the models can be efficiently represented via RBM ansatz states. Besides, the case for Kitaev's $D(\Zb_d)$ model, which is a generalized model of surface code, is also investigated.

quant-ph↗

arXiv2018

The center functor is fully faithful

We prove that the notion of Drinfeld center defines a functor from the category of indecomposable multi-tensor categories with morphisms given by bimodules to that of braided tensor categories with morphisms given by monoidal bimodules. Moreover, we apply some ideas from the physics of topological orders to prove that the center functor restricted to indecomposable multi-fusion categories (with additional conditions on the target category) is fully faithful. As byproducts, we provide new proofs to some important known results in fusion categories. In physics, this fully faithful functor gives the precise mathematical description of the boundary-bulk relation for 2+1D anomaly-free topological orders with gapped boundaries.

math.CT↗

arXiv2018

Effects of localized spatial variations on the uniform persistence and spreading speeds of time periodic two species competition systems

The current paper is devoted to the study of two species competition systems of the form \begin{equation*} \begin{cases} u_t(t,x)= \mathcal{A} u+u(a_1(t,x)-b_1(t,x)u-c_1(t,x)v),\quad x\in\RR\cr v_t(t,x)= \mathcal{A} v+ v(a_2(t,x)-b_2(t,x)u-c_2(t,x) v),\quad x\in\RR \end{cases} \end{equation*} where $\mathcal{A}u=u_{xx}$, or $(\mathcal{A}u)(t,x)=\int_{\RR}κ(y-x)u(t,y)dy-u(t,x)$ ($κ(\cdot)$ is a smooth non-negative convolution kernel supported on an interval centered at the origin), $a_i(t+T,x)=a_i(t,x)$, $b_i(t+T,x)=b_i(t,x)$, $c_i(t+T,x)=c_i(t,x)$, and $a_i$, $b_i$, and $c_i$ ($i=1,2$) are spatially homogeneous when $|x|\gg 1$, that is, $a_i(t,x)=a_i^0(t)$, $b_i(t,x)=b_i^0(t)$, $c_i(t,x)=c_i^0(t)$ for some $a_i^0(t)$, $b_i^0(t)$, $c_i^0(t)$, and $|x|\gg 1$. Such a system can be viewed as a time periodic competition system subject to certain localized spatial variations. We, in particular, study the effects of localized spatial variations on the uniform persistence and spreading speeds of the system. Among others, it is proved that any localized spatial variation does not affect the uniform persistence of the system, does not slow down the spreading speeds of the system, and under some linear determinant condition, does not speed up the spreading speeds.

math.AP↗

arXiv2018

Gapless edges of 2d topological orders and enriched monoidal categories

In this work, we give a precise mathematical description of a fully chiral gapless edge of a 2d topological order (without symmetry). We show that the observables on the 1+1D world sheet of such an edge consist of a family of topological edge excitations, boundary CFT's and walls between boundary CFT's. These observables can be described by a chiral algebra and an enriched monoidal category. This mathematical description automatically includes that of gapped edges as special cases. Therefore, it gives a unified framework to study both gapped and gapless edges. Moreover, the boundary-bulk duality also holds for gapless edges. More precisely, the unitary modular tensor category that describes the 2d bulk phase is exactly the Drinfeld center of the enriched monoidal category that describes the gapless/gapped edge. We propose a classification of all gapped and fully chiral gapless edges of a given bulk phase. In the end, we explain how modular-invariant bulk conformal field theories naturally emerge on certain gapless walls between two trivial phases.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2018

A classification of 3+1D bosonic topological orders (I): the case when point-like excitations are all bosons

Topological orders are new phases of matter beyond Landau symmetry breaking. They correspond to patterns of long-range entanglement. In recent years, it was shown that in 1+1D bosonic systems there is no nontrivial topological order, while in 2+1D bosonic systems the topological orders are classified by a pair: a modular tensor category and a chiral central charge. In this paper, we propose a partial classification of topological orders for 3+1D bosonic systems: If all the point-like excitations are bosons, then such topological orders are classified by unitary pointed fusion 2-categories, which are one-to-one labeled by a finite group $G$ and its group 4-cocycle $ω_4 \in \mathcal H^4[G;U(1)]$ up to group automorphisms. Furthermore, all such 3+1D topological orders can be realized by Dijkgraaf-Witten gauge theories.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Drinfeld center of enriched monoidal categories

We define the Drinfeld center of a monoidal category enriched over a braided monoidal category, and show that every modular tensor category can be realized in a canonical way as the Drinfeld center of a self-enriched monoidal category. We also give a generalization of this result for important applications in physics.

math.CT↗

arXiv2017

Boundary-bulk relation in topological orders

In this paper, we study the relation between an anomaly-free $n+$1D topological order, which are often called $n+$1D topological order in physics literature, and its $n$D gapped boundary phases. We argue that the $n+$1D bulk anomaly-free topological order for a given $n$D gapped boundary phase is unique. This uniqueness defines the notion of the "bulk" for a given gapped boundary phase. In this paper, we show that the $n+$1D "bulk" phase is given by the "center" of the $n$D boundary phase. In other words, the geometric notion of the "bulk" corresponds precisely to the algebraic notion of the "center". We achieve this by first introducing the notion of a morphism between two (potentially anomalous) topological orders of the same dimension, then proving that the notion of the "bulk" satisfies the same universal property as that of the "center" of an algebra in mathematics, i.e. "bulk = center". The entire argument does not require us to know the precise mathematical description of a (potentially anomalous) topological order. This result leads to concrete physical predictions.

cond-mat.str-el↗

arXiv2017

Topological orders and factorization homology

In the study of 2d (the space dimension) topological orders, it is well-known that bulk excitations are classified by unitary modular tensor categories. But these categories only describe the local observables on an open 2-disk in the long wave length limit. For example, the notion of braiding only makes sense locally. It is natural to ask how to obtain global observables on a closed surface. The answer is provided by the theory of factorization homology. We compute the factorization homology of a closed surface $Σ$ with the coefficient given by a unitary modular tensor category, and show that the result is given by a pair $(\mathbf{H}, u_Σ)$, where $\mathbf{H}$ is the category of finite-dimensional Hilbert spaces and $u_Σ\in \mathbf{H}$ is a distinguished object that coincides precisely with the Hilbert space assigned to the surface $Σ$ in Reshetikhin-Turaev TQFT. We also generalize this result to a closed stratified surface decorated by anomaly-free topological defects of codimension 0,1,2. This amounts to compute the factorization homology of a stratified surface with a coefficient system satisfying an anomaly-free condition.

math.QA↗