English

Modular categories, integrality and Egyptian fractions

Quantum Algebra 2010-12-09 v2

Abstract

It is a well-known result of Etingof, Nikshych and Ostrik that there are finitely many inequivalent integral modular categories of any fixed rank nn. This follows from a double-exponential bound on the maximal denominator in an Egyptian fraction representation of 1. A na\"ive computer search approach to the classification of rank nn integral modular categories using this bound quickly overwhelms the computer's memory (for n7n\geq 7). We use a modified strategy: find general conditions on modular categories that imply integrality and study the classification problem in these limited settings. The first such condition is that the order of the twist matrix is 2,3,4 or 6 and we obtain a fairly complete description of these classes of modular categories. The second condition is that the unit object is the only simple non-self-dual object, which is equivalent to odd-dimensionality. In this case we obtain a (linear) improvement on the bounds and employ number-theoretic techniques to obtain a classification for rank at most 11 for odd-dimensional modular categories.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1012.0814,
  title  = {Modular categories, integrality and Egyptian fractions},
  author = {Paul Bruillard and Eric C. Rowell},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.0814},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

version 2: clarified results in section 3

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:53:14.583Z