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Anomalous boundary correspondence of topological phases

by Jian-Hao Zhang, Shang-Qiang Ning

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Authors (as registered SciPost users):

Shangqiang Ning

Abstract

Topological phases protected by crystalline symmetries and internal symmetries are shown to enjoy fascinating one-to-one correspondence in classification. Here we investigate the physics content behind the abstract correspondence in three or higher-dimensional systems. We show correspondence between anomalous boundary states, which provides a new way to explore the quantum anomaly of symmetry from its crystalline equivalent counterpart. We show such correspondence directly in two scenarios, including the anomalous symmetry-enriched topological orders (SET) and critical surface states. (1) First of all, for the surface SET correspondence, we demonstrate it by considering examples involving time-reversal symmetry and mirror symmetry. We show that one 2D topological order can carry the time reversal anomaly as long as it can carry the mirror anomaly and vice versa, by directly establishing the mapping of the time reversal anomaly indicators and mirror anomaly indicators. Besides, we also consider other cases involving continuous symmetry, which leads us to introduce some new anomaly indicators for symmetry from its counterpart. (2) Furthermore, we also build up direct correspondence for (near) critical boundaries. Again taking topological phases protected by time reversal and mirror symmetry as examples, the direct correspondence of their (near) critical boundaries can be built up by coupled chain construction that was first proposed by Senthil and Fisher. The examples of critical boundary correspondence we consider in this paper can be understood in a unified framework that is related to \textit{hierarchy structure} of topological $O(n)$ nonlinear sigma model, that generalizes the Haldane's derivation of $O(3)$ sigma model from spin one-half system.