Rational indices for quantum ground state sectors

Abstract

We consider charge transport for interacting many-body systems with a gapped ground state subspace that is finitely degenerate and topologically ordered. To any locality-preserving, charge-conserving unitary that preserves the ground state space, we associate an index that is an integer multiple of 1/p, where p is the ground state degeneracy. We prove that the index is additive under composition of unitaries. This formalism gives rise to several applications: fractional quantum Hall conductance, a fractional Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) theorem that generalizes the standard LSM to systems where the translation-invariance is broken, and the interacting generalization of the Avron-Dana-Zak relation between the Hall conductance and the filling factor.