Conference

I will explain a general strategy to lift (2+1)D topological phases, in particular string nets, to (3+1)D models with line defects. This allows a systematic construction of (3+1)D topological theories with defects, including an improved version of the Walker-Wang Model. It has also an interesting application to quantum gravity as it leads to quantum geometry realizations for which all geometric operators have discrete and bounded spectra. I will furthermore comment on some interesting (self-) duality relations that emerge in these constructions.

Ground state degeneracy is an important characteristic of topological order. It is a natural question under what conditions such topological degeneracy extends to higher energy states or even to the full energy spectrum of a model, in such a way that the degeneracy is preserved when the Hamiltonian of the system is perturbed. It appears that Ising/Majorana wires have this property due to the presence of robust edge zero modes. Generalized wire models based on parafermions also have edge zero modes and topological degeneracy at special points in parameter space, but the stability of these modes is a much more intricate question. These models are related to Hopf algebras or tensor categories in several ways. In particular they are "golden chain" type models based on fusion categories for boundary defects of Abelian TQFTs. As such they are part of a much larger class of Hopf algebra based chain models with edge modes. It is natural to ask which of these have stable edge zero modes and/or full spectrum degeneracy.

It is well known that commutative Frobenius algebras can be represented as topological surfaces, using the graphical calculus of dualizable objects in monoidal 2-categories. We build on related ideas to show that the interacting Frobenius algebras of Duncan and Dunne, which have a Hopf algebra structure, arise naturally in a similar way, by requiring a single 3-morphism in a 3-category to be invertible. We show that this gives a purely geometrical proof of Mueger's version of Tannakian reconstruction of Hopf algebras from fusion categories equipped with a fibre functor. We also relate our results to the theory of lattice code surgery.

The Turaev-Viro invariant for a closed 3-manifold is defined as the contraction of a certain tensor network. The tensors correspond to tetrahedra in a triangulation of the manifold, with values determined by a fixed spherical category. For a manifold with boundary, the tensor network has free indices that can be associated to qudits, and its contraction gives the coefficients of a quantum error-correcting code. The code has local stabilizers determined by Levin and Wen. By studying braid group representations acting on equivalence classes of colored ribbon graphs embedded in a punctured sphere, we identify the anyons, and give a simple recipe for mapping fusion basis states of the doubled category to ribbon graphs. Combined with known universality results for anyonic systems, this provides a large family of schemes for quantum computation based on local deformations of stabilizer codes. These schemes may serve as a starting point for developing fault-tolerance schemes using continuous stabilizer measurements and active error-correction. This is joint work with Greg Kuperberg and Ben Reichardt.