Hall conductance and the statistics of flux insertions in gapped interacting lattice systems
Anton Kapustin, Nikita Sopenko
Abstract
We study charge transport for zero-temperature infinite-volume gapped lattice systems in two dimensions with short-range interactions. We show that the Hall conductance is locally computable and is the same for all systems that are in the same gapped phase. We provide a rigorous version of Laughlin’s flux-insertion argument, which shows that for short-range entangled systems, the Hall conductance is an integer multiple of e2/h. We show that the Hall conductance determines the statistics of flux insertions. For bosonic short-range entangled systems, this implies that the Hall conductance is an even multiple of e2/h. Finally, we adapt a proof of quantization of the Thouless charge pump to the case of infinite-volume gapped lattice systems in one dimension.