A degeneracy bound for homogeneous topological order
Jeongwan Haah
Abstract
We introduce a notion of homogeneous topological order, which is obeyed by most, if not all, known examples of topological order including fracton phases on quantum spins (qudits). The notion is a condition on the ground state subspace, rather than on the Hamiltonian, and demands that given a collection of ball-like regions, any linear transformation on the ground space be realized by an operator that avoids the ball-like regions. We derive a bound on the ground state degeneracy \mathcal D <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mstyle mathvariant="script"> <mml:mi>𝒟</mml:mi> </mml:mstyle> </mml:math> for systems with homogeneous topological order on an arbitrary closed Riemannian manifold of dimension d <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>d</mml:mi> </mml:math> , which reads [ D c (L/a)^{d-2}.] Here, L <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>L</mml:mi> </mml:math> is the diameter of the system, a <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>a</mml:mi> </mml:math> is the lattice spacing, and c <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>c</mml:mi> </mml:math> is a constant that only depends on the isometry class of the manifold, and \mu <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>μ</mml:mi> </mml:math> is a constant that only depends on the density of degrees of freedom. If d=2 <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>d</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>2</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , the constant c <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"> <mml:mi>c</mml:mi> </mml:math> is the (demi)genus of the space manifold. This bound is saturated up to constants by known examples.examples.