English

The boundaries of 2+1D fermionic topological orders

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2022-04-15 v1

Abstract

2+12+1D bosonic topological orders can be characterized by the S,TS,T matrices that encode the statistics of topological excitations. In particular, the S,TS,T matrices can be used to systematically obtain the gapped boundaries of bosonic topological orders. Such an approach, however, does not naively apply to fermionic topological orders (FTOs). In this work, we propose a systematic approach to obtain the gapped boundaries of 2+12+1D abelian FTOs. The main trick is to construct a bosonic extension in which the fermionic excitation is "condensed" to form the associated FTOs. Here we choose the parent bosonic topological order to be the Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 topological order, which indeed has a fermionic excitation. Such a construction allows us to find an explicit correspondence between abelian FTOs (described by odd KK-matrix KFK_F) and the "fermion-" condensed Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 topological orders (described by even KK-matrix KBK_B). This provides a systematic algorithm to obtain the modular covariant boundary partition functions as well as the boundary topological excitations of abelian FTOs. For example, the ν=11m\nu=1-\frac{1}{m} Laughlin's states have exactly one type of gapped boundary when mm is a square, whose boundary excitations form a Z2×Zm\mathbb{Z}_{2}\times\mathbb{Z}_{\sqrt{m}} fusion ring. Our approach can be easily generalized to obtain gapped and gapless boundaries of non-abelian fermionic topological orders.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2204.06589,
  title  = {The boundaries of 2+1D fermionic topological orders},
  author = {Chang-Han Chen and Xiao-Gang Wen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2204.06589},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T10:47:25.128Z