2023/09/18 by Jung Hoon Han, Ethan Lake, Han, Jung Hoon +7 · 5 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Photorefractive and Nonlinear Optics #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) #Theoretical and Computational Physics #Topological Materials and Phenomena
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.10036
openalex publication_date 2023/09/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the physics of one-dimensional symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases protected by symmetries whose symmetry generators exhibit spatial modulation. We focus in particular on phases protected by symmetries with linear (i.e., dipolar), quadratic and exponential modulations. We present a simple recipe for constructing modulated SPT models by generalizing the concept of decorated domain walls to spatially modulated symmetry defects, and develop several tools for characterizing and classifying modulated SPT phases. A salient feature of modulated symmetries is that they are generically only present for open chains, and are broken upon the imposition of periodic boundary conditions. Nevertheless, we show that SPT order is present even with periodic boundary conditions, a phenomenon we understand within the context of an object we dub a ``bundle symmetry''. In addition, we show that modulated SPT phases can avoid a certain no-go theorem, leading to an unusual algebraic structure in their matrix product state descriptions.