Symmetric Mass Generation of K\"ahler-Dirac Fermions from the Perspective of Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases

It is well known that symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases host non-trivial boundaries that cannot be mimicked in a lower-dimensional system with a conventional realization of symmetry. However, for SPT phases of bosons (fermions) within the cohomology (supercohomology) classification the boundary can be recreated without the bulk at the cost of a non-onsite symmetry action. This raises the question: can one also mimic the boundaries of SPT phases which lie outside the...

We study the classification of interacting fermionic and bosonic symmetry protected topological (SPT) states. We define a SPT state as whether or not it is separated from the trivial state through a bulk phase transition, which is a general definition applicable to SPT states with or without spatial symmetries. We show that in all dimensions short range interactions can reduce the classification of free fermion SPT states, and we demonstrate these results by making connection...

For the description of space-time fermions, Dirac-K\"ahler fields (inhomogeneous differential forms) provide an interesting alternative to the Dirac spinor fields. In this paper we develop a similar concept within the symplectic geometry of phase-spaces. Rather than on space-time, symplectic Dirac-K\"ahler fields can be defined on the classical phase-space of any Hamiltonian system. They are equivalent to an infinite family of metaplectic spinor fields, i.e. spinors of Sp(2N)...

We study a single exactly massless staggered fermion in the fundamental representation of an $SU(2)$ gauge group. We utilize an nHYP-smeared fermion action supplemented with additional heavy Pauli-Villars fields which serve to decrease lattice artifacts. The phase diagram exhibits a clear two-phase structure with a conformal phase at weak coupling and a novel new phase, the Symmetric Mass Generation (SMG) phase, appearing at strong coupling. The SMG phase is confining with al...

We present a detailed mass classification of all possible zero-energy modes in one-dimensional Dirac systems. By introducing a linear mass term into the Dirac Hamiltonian, we find that the topologically protected zero-energy modes have the mass-momentum duality. Based on the duality, we classify three fundamental zero-energy modes in 2 * 2 subspaces respectively: solitons in sublattice subspace, Majorana zero modes in Nambu subspace, and magnetic zero-energy modes in spin sub...

We report discovery of a topological Mott insulator in strongly-correlated Dirac semimetals. Such an interaction-driven topological state has been theoretically proposed but not yet observed with unbiased large scale numerical simulations. In our model, interactions between electrons are mediated by Ising spins in a transverse field. The results indicate that the topological mass term is dynamically generated and the resulting quantum phase transition belongs to the (2+1)D $N...

We describe a novel way to think about bosonic lattice theories in Hamiltonian form where each lattice site has only a half boson degree of freedom. The construction requires a non-trivial Poisson bracket between neighboring sites and leads to gapless theories with non-invertible symmetries. We also describe a bosonic version of Kahler-Dirac fermions, dubbed Kahler-Dirac bosons that can be performed on any triangulation of a manifold. This also leads to a straightforward impl...

We show that a class of fermion theory formulated on a compact, curved manifold will generate a condensate whose magnitude is determined only by the volume and Euler characteristic of the space. The construction requires that the fermions be treated as K\"{a}hler-Dirac fields and the condensate arises from an anomaly associated with a $U(1)$ global symmetry which is subsequently broken to a discrete subgroup. Remarkably the anomaly survives under discretization of the space w...

We describe recent progress in our understanding of the interplay between interactions, symmetry, and topology in states of quantum matter. We focus on a minimal generalization of the celebrated topological band insulators to interacting many particle systems, known as Symmetry Protected Topological (SPT) phases. In common with the topological band insulators these states have a bulk gap and no exotic excitations but have non-trivial surface states that are protected by symme...

Symmetry protected topological (SPT) states have boundary 't Hooft anomalies that obstruct an effective boundary theory realized in its own dimension with UV completion and an on-site $G$-symmetry. In this work, yet we show that a certain anomalous non-on-site $G$ symmetry along the boundary becomes on-site when viewed as an extended $H$ symmetry, via a suitable group extension $1\to K\to H\to G\to1$. Namely, a non-perturbative global (gauge/gravitational) anomaly in $G$ beco...