Symmetric Tensor Gauge Theories on Curved Spaces

Understand

Fractons and other subdimensional particles are an exotic class of emergent quasi-particle excitations with severely restricted mobility.

• A wide class of models featuring these quasi-particles have a natural description in the language of symmetric tensor gauge theories, which feature conservation laws restricting the motion of particles to lower-dimensional sub-spaces, such as lines or points.
• In this work, we investigate the fate of symmetric tensor gauge theories in the presence of spatial curvature.
• We find that weak curvature can induce small (exponentially suppressed) violations on the mobility restrictions of charges, leaving a sense of asymptotic fractonic/sub-dimensional behavior on generic manifolds.