In and around abelian anyon models *

Abstract

Abstract Anyon models are algebraic structures that model universal topological properties in topological phases of matter and can be regarded as mathematical characterization of topological order in two spacial dimensions. It is conjectured that every anyon model, or mathematically unitary modular tensor category, can be realized as the representation category of some chiral conformal field theory, or mathematically vertex operator algebra/local conformal net. This conjecture is known to be true for abelian anyon models providing support for the conjecture. We reexamine abelian anyon models from several different angles. First anyon models are algebraic data for both topological quantum field theories and chiral conformal field theories. While it is known that each abelian anyon model can be realized by a quantum abelian Chern–Simons (CS) theory and chiral conformal field theory, the construction is not algorithmic. Our goal is to provide such an explicit algorithm for a K-matrix in CS theory and a positive definite even one for a lattice conformal field theory. Secondly anyon models and chiral conformal field theories underlie the bulk-edge correspondence for topological phases of matter. But there are interesting subtleties in this correspondence when stability of the edge theory and topological symmetry are taken into consideration. Therefore, our focus is on the algorithmic reconstruction of extremal chiral conformal field theories with small central charges. Finally we conjecture that a much stronger reconstruction holds for abelian anyon models: every abelian anyon model can be realized as the representation category of some non-lattice extremal vertex operator algebra generalizing the moonshine realization of the trivial anyon model.