Duality and Stacking of Bosonic and Fermionic SPT Phases

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between bosonic and fermionic symmetry-protected topological phases in one dimension, revealing an often isomorphic classification structure and analyzing the nature of this isomorphism.

Contribution

It demonstrates that bosonic and fermionic SPT classifications are often isomorphic and characterizes when this occurs, beyond known dualities like Jordan-Wigner.

Findings

Classifications are often isomorphic under stacking.

Explicit isomorphism exists for all unitary and many antiunitary symmetry groups.

The isomorphism is not realized by Jordan-Wigner or similar dualities.

Abstract

We study the interplay of duality and stacking of bosonic and fermionic symmetry-protected topological phases in one spatial dimension. In general the classifications of bosonic and fermionic phases have different group structures under the operation of stacking, but we argue that they are often isomorphic and give an explicit isomorphism when it exists. This occurs for all unitary symmetry groups and many groups with antiunitary symmetries, which we characterize. We find that this isomorphism is typically not implemented by the Jordan-Wigner transformation, nor is it a consequence of any other duality transformation that falls within the framework of topological holography. Along the way to this conclusion, we recover the fermionic stacking rule in terms of G-pin partition functions, give a gauge-invariant characterization of the twisted group cohomology invariant, and state a procedure for stacking gapped phases in the formalism of symmetry topological field theory.