Translation invariance, topology, and protection of criticality in chains of interacting anyons

TL;DR

This paper investigates the critical properties of chains of interacting anyons, demonstrating how topological symmetries protect criticality and how finite size scaling can reveal universal behavior across different surface topologies.

Contribution

It extends the graphical formalism for anyons to higher genus surfaces and analyzes how energy spectra on discs relate to those on tori, revealing topological protection of criticality.

Findings

Energy spectrum on disc is a subset of that on the torus

Topological symmetry protects criticality in anyon chains

Finite size scaling reveals universal critical behavior

Abstract

Using finite size scaling arguments, the critical properties of a chain of interacting anyons can be extracted from the low energy spectrum of a finite system. In Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 160409 (2007), Feiguin et al. showed that an antiferromagnetic (AFM) chain of Fibonacci anyons on a torus is in the same universality class as the tricritical Ising model, and that criticality is protected by a topological symmetry. In the present paper we first review the graphical formalism for the study of anyons on the disc and demonstrate how this formalism may be consistently extended to the study of systems on surfaces of higher genus. We then employ this graphical formalism to study finite rings of interacting anyons on both the disc and the torus, and show that analysis on the disc necessarily yields an energy spectrum which is a subset of that which is obtained on the torus. For a critical Hamiltonian, one may extract from this subset the scaling dimensions of the local scaling operators which respect the topological symmetry of the system. Related considerations are also shown to apply for open chains.