English

Complexity for link complement States in Chern Simons Theory

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-09-08 v3

Abstract

We study notions of complexity for link complement states in Chern Simons theory with compact gauge group GG. Such states are obtained by the Euclidean path integral on the complement of nn-component links inside a 3-manifold M3M_3. For the Abelian theory at level kk we find that a natural set of fundamental gates exists and one can identify the complexity as differences of linking numbers modulo kk. Such linking numbers can be viewed as coordinates which embeds all link complement states into Zkn(n1)/2\mathbb{Z}_k ^{\otimes n(n-1)/2} and the complexity is identified as the distance with respect to a particular norm. For non-Abelian Chern Simons theories, the situation is much more complicated. We focus here on torus link states and show that the problem can be reduced to defining complexity for a single knot complement state. We suggest a systematic way to choose a set of minimal universal generators for single knot complement states and then evaluate the complexity using such generators. A detailed illustration is shown for SU(2)kSU(2)_k Chern Simons theory and the results can be extended to general compact gauge group.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2101.03443,
  title  = {Complexity for link complement States in Chern Simons Theory},
  author = {Robert G. Leigh and Pin-Chun Pai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.03443},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T21:57:18.443Z