2–6 Sept 2024
University of Southampton
Europe/London timezone

Gapped phases and phase transitions with categorical symmetries

5 Sept 2024, 14:50
20m
B44/LTB (University of Southampton)

B44/LTB

University of Southampton

Talk in parallel session Generalised symmetries Parallel sessions

Speaker

Lea Bottini (University of Oxford)

Description

Recently, the notion of symmetry has been vastly generalised, coming to include what are now known as categorical, or non-invertible symmetries. In this talk, I will present a framework to study gapped infra-red phases of theories that have such categorical symmetries, which relies on the so-called Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT). This is a (d+1)-dimensional topological theory associated to a d-dimensional theory that neatly encodes its symmetry properties and has emerged as a key tool to study generalised symmetries. After introducing the concept of SymTFT, I will show how we can use it to extract information on the gapped phase, such as the number of vacua, the action of the symmetry on such vacua, and the order parameters. Focusing on (1+1)-dimensions, I will also introduce a generalisation of the SymTFT that allows us to characterise phase transitions between such gapped phases. This framework thus provides a generalised version of the Landau paradigm for symmetries that go beyond the standard group case.

Link to publication (if applicable)

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2312.17322
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03786
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2310.03784

Author

Lea Bottini (University of Oxford)

Presentation materials