Colloquium: Photons and electrons as emergent phenomena

@article{Levin2004ColloquiumPA,
  title={Colloquium: Photons and electrons as emergent phenomena},
  author={Michael Levin and Xiao-Gang Wen},
  journal={Reviews of Modern Physics},
  year={2004},
  volume={77},
  pages={871-879}
}
Recent advances in condensed-matter theory have revealed that new and exotic phases of matter can exist in spin models (or more precisely, local bosonic models) via a simple physical mechanism, known as ``string-net condensation.'' These new phases of matter have the unusual property that their collective excitations are gauge bosons and fermions. In some cases, the collective excitations can behave just like the photons, electrons, gluons, and quarks in our vacuum. This suggests that photons… 
View PDF on arXiv
117 Citations
Highly Influential Citations
3
Background Citations
30
Methods Citations
3

117 Citations

Quantum ether: photons and electrons from a rotor model

We give an example of a purely bosonic model--a rotor model on the 3D cubic lattice--whose low energy excitations behave like massless U(1) gauge bosons and massless Dirac fermions. This model can be…

Modern Physics of the Condensed State: Strong Correlations and Quantum Topology

The theme of this survey is the application of new ideas of uncommon quantum states to the physics of the condensed state, in particular, of solids, in the context of the contemporary field theory. A…

Light-induced gauge fields for ultracold atoms

Different realized and proposed techniques for creating gauge potentials-both Abelian and non-Abelian-in atomic systems and their implication in the context of quantum simulation are reviewed.

Emergent gauge symmetries: making symmetry as well as breaking it

  • S. Bass
  • Physics
    Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A
  • 2021
Recent thinking on possible emergent gauge symmetries in particle physics is discussed, commenting also on Higgs phenomena and the vacuum energy or cosmological constant puzzle inEmergent gauge systems.

Local bosonization of massive fermions in three spatial dimensions with rotation invariance

In relativistic quantum field theory particles of half-integer spin must obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Their quantum operators must anticommute at spacelike separation in contrast to commuting…

Topological Order: From Long-Range Entangled Quantum Matter to a Unified Origin of Light and Electrons

New “topological” phenomena, such as topological degeneracy that reveals the existence of those new phases—topologically ordered phases are discussed, just like zero viscosity defines the superfluid order.

Atomic quantum simulation of dynamical gauge fields coupled to fermionic matter: from string breaking to evolution after a quench.

Using a Fermi-Bose mixture of ultracold atoms in an optical lattice, a quantum simulator is constructed for a U(1) gauge theory coupled to fermionic matter to investigate string breaking as well as the real-time evolution after a quench in gauge theories, which are inaccessible to classical simulation methods.

Emergent gauge symmetries and particle physics

Topological Order : From Long-Range Entangled Quantum Matter to a Unified Origin of Light and Electrons

We review the progress in the last 20–30 years, duringwhichwe discovered that there aremany newphases ofmatter that are beyond the traditional Landau symmetry breaking theory. We discuss new…

Ultracold quantum gases and lattice systems: quantum simulation of lattice gauge theories

Abelian and non‐Abelian gauge theories are of central importance in many areas of physics. In condensed matter physics, Abelian U(1) lattice gauge theories arise in the description of certain quantum…
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 25 REFERENCES

Quantum order from string net condensations and origin of light and massless fermions

Recently, it was pointed out that quantum orders and the associated projective symmetry groups can produce and protect massless gauge bosons and massless fermions in local bosonic models. In this…

Fermions, strings, and gauge fields in lattice spin models

We investigate the general properties of lattice spin models with emerging fermionic excitations. We argue that fermions always come in pairs and their creation operator always has a stringlike…

String-net condensation: A physical mechanism for topological phases

We show that quantum systems of extended objects naturally give rise to a large class of exotic phases---namely topological phases. These phases occur when extended objects, called ``string-nets,''…

Artificial light and quantum order in systems of screened dipoles

The origin of light is an unsolved mystery in nature. Recently, it was suggested that light may originate from a new kind of order, quantum order. To test this idea in experiments, we study systems…

Origin of gauge bosons from strong quantum correlations.

  • X. Wen
  • Physics
    Physical review letters
  • 2002
Through models, it is shown that the existence of light can simply be a phenomenon of quantum coherence in a system with many degrees of freedom.

A class of P,T-invariant topological phases of interacting electrons

Gauge Theory of elementary particle physics

This is a practical introduction to the principal ideas in gauge theory and their applications to elementary particle physics. It explains technique and methodology with simple exposition backed up…

Quantum Mechanics of Fractional-Spin Particles

Composites formed from charged particles and vortices in (2+1)-dimensional models, or flux tubes in three-dimensional models, can have any (fractional) angular momentum. The statistics of these…

Phase transitions in Abelian lattice gauge theories

Field theory of strings as a collective field theory of U(N) gauge fields

We develop a collective field theory of a U(N) gauge field, which involves gauge-invariant operators only. We treat gauge-invariant path-ordered phase factors as collective fields on string space.…