English

Gapped domain walls between 2+1D topologically ordered states

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2020-07-01 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.08470,
  title  = {Gapped domain walls between 2+1D topologically ordered states},
  author = {Tian Lan and Xueda Wen and Liang Kong and Xiao-Gang Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.08470},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

29 pages, 18 figures, comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:21:08.439Z