Spacetime symmetry-enriched SymTFT: from LSM anomalies to modulated symmetries and beyond

TL;DR

This paper extends the SymTFT framework to include spacetime symmetries, analyzing their interplay with internal symmetries in 1+1D systems, and classifies related anomalies and phases using explicit constructions.

Contribution

It introduces a method to incorporate spacetime symmetries into SymTFT, enabling the classification of symmetry-enriched phases and anomalies in low-dimensional quantum systems.

Findings

Linked LSM anomalies to modulated symmetries.

Constructed SymTFTs for translation, reflection, and time reversal symmetries.

Identified mixed anomalies and symmetry fractionalization effects.

Abstract

We extend the Symmetry Topological Field Theory (SymTFT) framework beyond internal symmetries by including geometric data that encode spacetime symmetries. Concretely, we enrich the SymTFT of an internal symmetry by spacetime symmetries and study the resulting symmetry-enriched topological (SET) order, which captures the interplay between the spacetime and internal symmetries. We illustrate the framework by focusing on symmetries in ${1+1}$D. To this end, we first analyze how gapped boundaries of ${2+1}$D SETs affect the enriching symmetry, and apply this within the SymTFT framework to gauging and detecting anomalies of the ${1+1}$D symmetry, as well as to classifying ${1+1}$D symmetry-enriched phases. We then consider quantum spin chains and explicitly construct the SymTFTs for three prototypical spacetime symmetries: lattice translations, spatial reflections, and time reversal. For lattice translations, the interplay with internal symmetries is encoded in the SymTFT by translations permuting anyons, which causes the continuum description of the SymTFT to be a foliated field theory. Using this, we elucidate the relation between Lieb-Schultz-Mattis (LSM) anomalies and modulated symmetries and classify modulated symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases. For reflection and time-reversal symmetries, the interplay can additionally be encoded by symmetry fractionalization data in the SymTFT, and we identify mixed anomalies and study gauging for such examples.