Field Theories for Gauged Symmetry Protected Topological Phases: Abelian Gauge Theories with non-Abelian Quasiparticles

Understand

Dijkgraaf-Witten (DW) theories are of recent interest to the condensed matter community, in part because they represent topological phases of matter, but also because they characterize the response theory of certain symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases.

• However, as yet there has not been a comprehensive treatment of the spectra of these models in the field theoretic setting -- the goal of this work is to fill the gap in the literature, at least for a selection of DW models with abelian gauge groups but non-abelian topological order.
• As applications, various correlation functions and fusion rules of line operators are calculated.
• We discuss for example the appearance of non-abelian statistics in DW theories with abelian gauge groups.