Symmetry Enriched Fracton Phases from Supersolid Duality

Understand

Motivated by the recently established duality between elasticity of crystals and a fracton tensor gauge theory, we combine it with boson-vortex duality, to explicitly account for bosonic statistics of the underlying atoms.

• We thereby derive a hybrid vector-tensor gauge dual of a supersolid, which features both crystalline and superfluid order.
• The gauge dual describes a fracton state of matter with full dipole mobility endowed by the superfluid order, as governed by "mutual" axion electrodynamics between the fracton and vortex sectors of the theory, with an associated generalized Witten effect.
• Vortex condensation restores U(1) symmetry, confines dipoles to be subdimensional (recovering the dislocation glide constraint of a commensurate quantum crystal), and drives a phase transition between two distinct fracton phases.