Paper detail

Topological order: from long-range entangled quantum matter to an unification of light and electrons

In primary school, we were told that there are four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. In college, we learned that there are much more than four states of matter. For example, there are ferromagnetic states as revealed by the phenomenon of magnetization and superfluid states as defined by the phenomenon of zero-viscosity. The various phases in our colorful world are so rich that it is amazing that they can be understood systematically by the symmetry breaking theory of Landau. In this paper, we will review the progress in last 20 -- 30 years, during which we discovered that there are even more interesting phases that are beyond Landau symmetry breaking theory. We discuss new "topological" phenomena, such as topological degeneracy, that reveal the existence of those new phases - topologically ordered phases. Just like zero-viscosity defines the superfluid order, the new "topological" phenomena define the topological order at macroscopic level. As a new type of order, topological order requires a new mathematical frame work, such as fusion category and group cohomology, to describe it. More recently, we find that, at microscopical level, topological order is due to long-range quantum entanglements, just like fermion superfluid is due to fermion-pair condensation. Long-range quantum entanglements lead to many amazing emergent phenomena, such as fractional quantum numbers, fractional/non-Abelian statistics, and perfect conducting boundary channels. Long-range quantum entanglements can even provide a unified origin of light and electrons (or more generally, gauge interactions and Fermi statistics): light waves (gauge fields) are fluctuations of long-range entanglements, and electrons (fermions) are defects of long-range entanglements.