English

Fracton-like phases from subsystem symmetries

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-07-08 v3 High Energy Physics - Theory

Abstract

We study models with fracton-like order based on Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 lattice gauge theories with subsystem symmetries in d=2d=2 and d=3d=3 spatial dimensions. The 3d3d model reduces to the 33-dimensional Toric Code when subsystem symmetry is broken, giving an example of a subsystem symmetry enriched topological phase (SSET). Although not topologically protected, its ground state degeneracy has as leading contribution a term which grows exponentially with the square of the linear size of the system. Also, there are completely mobile gauge charges living along with immobile fractons. Our method shows that fracton-like phases are also present in more usual lattice gauge theories. We calculate the entanglement entropy SAS_A of these models in a sub-region AA of the lattice and show that it is equal to the logarithm of the ground state degeneracy of a particular restriction of the full model to AA.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.07601,
  title  = {Fracton-like phases from subsystem symmetries},
  author = {J. P. Ibieta-Jimenez and L. N. Queiroz Xavier and M. Petrucci and P. Teotonio-Sobrinho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.07601},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

16 pages, 10 figures. Version to appear in PRB

R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:52:40.890Z