Non-Invertible Symmetries and Boundaries for Two-Dimensional Fermions
Abstract
We study the relation between boundary conditions and categorical symmetries of two-dimensional fermionic conformal field theories. We determine all anomaly-free invertible global symmetries of two free complex Weyl fermions, which take the form for each primitive Pythagorean triple . The theory is self-dual under gauging any of these symmetries, and so to each there is associated a non-invertible topological defect. We study the properties of these lines, and show that any conformal boundary condition of two Dirac fermions that preserves a symmetry can be found by dressing a trivial Dirichlet boundary with one of them. We discuss two microscopic descriptions of these defects: fermions coupled to a quantum-mechanical rotor degree of freedom; and an abelian gauge theory that realises symmetric mass generation in a half-space.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.13952,
title = {Non-Invertible Symmetries and Boundaries for Two-Dimensional Fermions},
author = {Guillermo Arias-Tamargo and Philip Boyle Smith and Rishi Mouland and Maxwell L. Velásquez Cotini Hutt},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.13952},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
48 pages + appendices