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What Symmetries are Preserved by a Fermion Boundary State?

High Energy Physics - Theory 2021-02-26 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons

Abstract

Usually, a left-moving fermion in d=1+1 dimensions reflects off a boundary to become a right-moving fermion. This means that, while overall fermion parity (1)F(-1)^F is conserved, chiral fermion parity for left- and right-movers individually is not. Remarkably, there are boundary conditions that do preserve chiral fermion parity, but only when the number of Majorana fermions is a multiple of 8. In this paper we classify all such boundary states for 2N2N Majorana fermions when a U(1)NU(1)^N symmetry is also preserved. The fact that chiral-parity-preserving boundary conditions only exist when 2N2N is divisible by 8 translates to an interesting property of charge lattices. We also classify the enhanced continuous symmetry preserved by such boundary states. The state with the maximum such symmetry is the SO(8)SO(8) boundary state, first constructed by Maldacena and Ludwig to describe the scattering of fermions off a monopole

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Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.07369,
  title  = {What Symmetries are Preserved by a Fermion Boundary State?},
  author = {Philip Boyle Smith and David Tong},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.07369},
  year   = {2021}
}

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21 pages