Exotic $U(1)$ symmetries, duality, and fractons in 3+1-dimensional quantum field theory
Nathan Seiberg, Shu-Heng Shao
Abstract
We extend our exploration of nonstandard continuum quantum field theories in 2+1 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> dimensions to 3+1 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mn>3</mml:mn> <mml:mo>+</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> dimensions. These theories exhibit exotic global symmetries, a peculiar spectrum of charged states, unusual gauge symmetries, and surprising dualities. Many of the systems we study have a known lattice construction. In particular, one of them is a known gapless fracton model. The novelty here is in their continuum field theory description. In this paper, we focus on models with a global U(1) <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>U</mml:mi> <mml:mo stretchy="false" form="prefix">(</mml:mo> <mml:mn>1</mml:mn> <mml:mo stretchy="false" form="postfix">)</mml:mo> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> symmetry and in a followup paper we will study models with a global \mathbb{Z}_N <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:msub> <mml:mstyle mathvariant="double-struck"> <mml:mi>ℤ</mml:mi> </mml:mstyle> <mml:mi>N</mml:mi> </mml:msub> </mml:math> symmetry.