From Doubled Chern-Simons-Maxwell Lattice Gauge Theory to Extensions of the Toric Code

Abstract

We regularize compact and non-compact Abelian Chern-Simons-Maxwell theories on a spatial lattice using the Hamiltonian formulation. We consider a doubled theory with gauge fields living on a lattice and its dual lattice. The Hilbert space of the theory is a product of local Hilbert spaces, each associated with a link and the corresponding dual link. The two electric field operators associated with the link-pair do not commute. In the non-compact case with gauge group $\mathbb{R}$, each local Hilbert space is analogous to the one of a charged "particle" moving in the link-pair group space ${\mathbb{R}}^2$ in a constant "magnetic" background field. In the compact case, the link-pair group space is a torus $U(1{)}^2$ threaded by $k$ units of quantized "magnetic" flux, with $k$ being the level of the Chern-Simons theory. The holonomies of the torus $U(1{)}^2$ give rise to two self-adjoint extension parameters, which form two non-dynamical background lattice gauge fields that explicitly break the manifest gauge symmetry from $U(1)$ to $\mathbb{Z}(k)$. The local Hilbert space of a link-pair then decomposes into representations of a magnetic translation group. In the pure Chern-Simons limit of a large "photon" mass, this results in a $\mathbb{Z}(k)$-symmetric variant of Kitaev's toric code, self-adjointly extended by the two non-dynamical background lattice gauge fields. Electric charges on the original lattice and on the dual lattice obey mutually anyonic statistics with the statistics angle $\frac{2\pi }{k}$. Non-Abelian $U(k)$ Berry gauge fields that arise from the self-adjoint extension parameters may be interesting in the context of quantum information processing.

Comments: 38 pages, 4 figures