From effective Hamiltonian to anomaly inflow in topological orders with boundaries

Abstract

Whether two boundary conditions of a two-dimensional topological order can be continuously connected without a phase transition in between remains a challenging question. We tackle this challenge by constructing an effective Hamiltonian of anyon interaction that realizes such a continuous deformation. At any point along the deformation, the model remains a fixed point model describing a gapped topological order with gapped boundaries. That the deformation retains the gap is due to the anomaly cancelation between the boundary and bulk. Such anomaly inflow is quantitatively studied using our effective Hamiltonian. We apply our method of effective Hamiltonian to the extended twisted quantum double model with boundaries (constructed by two of us in ref. [1]). We show that for a given gauge group G and a three-cocycle in H3[G, U(1)] in the bulk, any two gapped boundaries for a fixed subgroup K ⊆ G on the boundary can be continuously connected via an effective Hamiltonian. Our results can be straightforwardly generalized to the extended Levin-Wen model with boundaries (constructed by three of us in ref. [2]).