Fermions, strings, and gauge fields in lattice spin models

By Michael Levin, X. Wen. 2003

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the general properties of lattice spin models with emerging fermionic excitations. We argue that fermions always come in pairs and their creation operator always has a stringlike structure with the newly created particles appearing at the end points of the string. The physical implication of this structure is that the fermions always couple to a nontrivial gauge field. We present exactly soluble examples of this phenomenon in two and three dimensions. Our analysis is based on an algebraic formula that relates the statistics of a lattice particle to the properties of its hopping operators. This approach has the advantage in that it works in any number of dimensions\char22{}unlike the flux-binding picture developed in fractional quantum Hall theory.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Condensed Matter Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f0bb8b473c36133ba55df9f03ae1b34d6a33f79

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Condensed Matter Physics

Citations in the corpus

Doping a Mott insulator: Physics of high-temperature superconductivity (2004, background): “However, recently, it was realized that some models (Kitaev, 2003; Levin and Wen, 2003; Wen, 2003b) can be solved by the slave-boson theory exactly (Wen, 2003c).”