Fracton phases of matter

By M. Pretko, Xie Chen, Yizhi You. International Journal of Modern Physics A, 2020

325 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Fractons are a new type of quasiparticle which are immobile in isolation, but can often move by forming bound states. Fractons are found in a variety of physical settings, such as spin liquids and elasticity theory, and exhibit unusual phenomenology, such as gravitational physics and localization. The past several years have seen a surge of interest in these exotic particles, which have come to the forefront of modern condensed matter theory. In this review, we provide a broad treatment of fractons, ranging from pedagogical introductory material to discussions of recent advances in the field. We begin by demonstrating how the fracton phenomenon naturally arises as a consequence of higher moment conservation laws, often accompanied by the emergence of tensor gauge theories. We then provide a survey of fracton phases in spin models, along with the various tools used to characterize them, such as the foliation framework. We discuss in detail the manifestation of fracton physics in elasticity theory, as well as the connections of fractons with localization and gravitation. Finally, we provide an overview of some recently proposed platforms for fracton physics, such as Majorana islands and hole-doped antiferromagnets. We conclude with some open questions and an outlook on the field.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8b899a0760e9c21abc635b5463de6f2142a2e3b9

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In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

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Citations in the corpus

Long-Range Entanglement from Measuring Symmetry-Protected Topological Phases (2021, background): “Even restricting to gapped phases, the latter contains interesting cases such as intrinsic topological [8– 13] and fracton order [14–20].”
Quantum Many-Body Scars: A Quasiparticle Perspective (2022, background): “(108, 109)), and their combination produces O(L(3)) symmetry sectors labeled by (Q,P ) quantum numbers in a system of size L.”
Hilbert Space Fragmentation and Commutant Algebras (2021, background): “Classic examples of systems that fall into this category are stabilizer code models such as the toric code [58, 59] or certain fracton models [60, 61].”
Fracton hydrodynamics (2020, background): “[45] Michael Pretko, Xie Chen, and Yizhi You, “Fracton phases of matter,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.”
Measurement as a Shortcut to Long-Range Entangled Quantum Matter (2022, methodology): “Specifically, the effective parton Hamiltonian derived from perturbation theory reads Heff = i 4 ∑ jk Ajkcjck (10) with Ajk including both nearest-neighbor and nextnearest-neighbor hopping amplitudes (see Ref.”
Generalized Symmetries in Condensed Matter (2022, unknown): “But this is a description of the spontaneous breaking of a higher-form symmetry (16, 25): the generators of the broken part of the higher-form symmetry commute with the Hamiltonian (at least at low energies) and act nontrivially on the groundstates 6 .”