Exactly soluble local bosonic cocycle models, statistical transmutation, and simplest time-reversal symmetric topological orders in 3+1 dimensions

We propose a generic construction of exactly soluble local bosonic models that realize various topological orders with gappable boundaries. In particular, we construct an exactly soluble bosonic model that realizes a (3+1)-dimensional [(3+1)D] Z_{2}-gauge theory with emergent fermionic Kramers doubl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Wen, Xiao-Gang
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Physics
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: American Physical Society 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110247
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5874-581X
Description
Summary:We propose a generic construction of exactly soluble local bosonic models that realize various topological orders with gappable boundaries. In particular, we construct an exactly soluble bosonic model that realizes a (3+1)-dimensional [(3+1)D] Z_{2}-gauge theory with emergent fermionic Kramers doublet. We show that the emergence of such a fermion will cause the nucleation of certain topological excitations in space-time without pin^{+} structure. The exactly soluble model also leads to a statistical transmutation in (3+1)D. In addition, we construct exactly soluble bosonic models that realize 2 types of time-reversal symmetry-enriched Z_{2} topological orders in 2+1 dimensions, and 20 types of simplest time-reversal symmetry-enriched topological (SET) orders which have only one nontrivial pointlike and stringlike topological excitation. Many physical properties of those topological states are calculated using the exactly soluble models. We find that some time-reversal SET orders have pointlike excitations that carry Kramers doublet, a fractionalized time-reversal symmetry. We also find that some Z_{2} SET orders have stringlike excitations that carry anomalous (nononsite) Z_{2} symmetry, which can be viewed as a fractionalization of Z_{2} symmetry on strings. Our construction is based on cochains and cocycles in algebraic topology, which is very versatile. In principle, it can also realize emergent topological field theory beyond the twisted gauge theory.