Paper detail

Modular transformations and topological orders in two dimensions

The string-net approach by Levin and Wen and the local unitary transformation approach by Chen, Gu and Wen provided ways to systematically label non-chiral topological orders in 2D. In those approaches, different topologically ordered many-body wave functions were characterized by different fixed-point tensors. Though extremely powerful, the resulting fixed-point tensors were mathematical abstractions and thus lacked a physical interpretation. As a result it was hard to judge if two different fixed-point tensors described the same quantum phase or not. We want to improve that approach by giving a more physical description of the topological orders. We find that the non-Abelian Berry's phases, $T$- and $S$-matrices, of the topological protected degenerate ground states on a torus give rise to a more physical description of topological orders. Using the Verlinde conjecture, we can even choose the canonical basis for the $T$- and $S$-matrices. It is conjectured that the $T$ and $S$-matrices form a complete and one-to-one characterization of non-chiral topological orders and can replace the fixed-point tensor description to give us a more physical label for topological orders. As a result, all the topological properties can be obtained from the $T$- and $S$-matrices, such as number of quasiparticle types (from the dimension of $T$ or $S$), the quasiparticle statistics (from the diagonal elements of $T$), the quantum dimensions of quasiparticles (from the first row of $S$), \etc.