Tuesday, July 24, 2012

1207.5304 (Juerg Froehlich et al.)

Gauge theory of topological phases of matter    [PDF]

Juerg Froehlich, Philipp Werner
We study the response of quantum many-body systems to coupling some of their degrees of freedom to small, slowly varying external gauge fields, which arise when global symmetries are gauged. This analysis leads to a "gauge theory of states of matter" generalizing the well known Landau theory of order parameters. We illustrate the power of our approach by deriving and interpreting the gauge-invariant (local) effective actions of superconductors, 2D electron gases exhibiting the quantized Hall- and spin-Hall effect, 3D topological insulators and axion electrodynamics.
View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1207.5304

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