Fractonic order and emergent fermionic gauge theory

Abstract

We consider fermionic systems in which fermion parity is conserved within rigid subsystems, and describe an explicit procedure for gauging such subsystem fermion parity symmetries to obtain bosonic spin Hamiltonians. We show that gauging planar or fractal subsystem fermion parity symmetry in three spatial dimensions gives rise to a plethora of exactly solvable spin models exhibiting novel gapped fractonic orders characterized by emergent fermionic gauge theory. The low energy excitations of these models include fractional quasiparticles with constrained mobility and emergent fermionic statistics. We illustrate this phenomenon through a series of examples including fermionic analogs of both foliated fracton phases and fractal spin liquids. We find that the foliated analogs actually exhibit the same fractonic order as their bosonic counterparts, while this is not generally the case for fermionic fractal spin liquids.

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