In this work, for a finite group $G$ and a 4-cocycle $ω\in Z^4(G, \mathbf{k}^\times)$, we compute explicitly the center of the monoidal 2-category $\operatorname{2Vec}_G^ω$ of $ω$-twisted $G$-graded 1-categories of finite dimensional $\mathbf{k}$-vector spaces. This center gives a precise mathematical description of the topological defects in the associated 3+1D Dijkgraaf-Witten TQFT. We prove that this center is a braided monoidal 2-category with a trivial sylleptic center.
The goal of the paper is to categorify Dijkgraaf-Witten theory, aiming at providing foundation for a direct construction of Dijkgraaf-Witten theory as an Extended Topological Quantum Field Theory. The main tool is cohomology with coefficients in a Picard groupoid, namely the Picard groupoid of hermitian lines.
Dijkgraaf-Witten theories are extended three-dimensional topological field theories of Turaev-Viro type. They can be constructed geometrically from categories of bundles via linearization. Boundaries and surface defects or interfaces in quantum field theories are of interest in various applications and provide structural insight. We perform a geometric study of boundary conditions and surface defects in Dijkgraaf-Witten theories. A crucial tool is the linearization of categories of relative bundles. We present the categories of generalized Wilson lines produced by such a linearization procedur…
We construct a version of Dijkgraaf-Witten theory based on a compact abelian Lie group within the formalism of Turaev's homotopy quantum field theory. As an application we show that the 2+1-dimensional theory based on U(1) classifies lens spaces up to homotopy type.
Based on a weak action of a finite group J on a finite group G, we present a geometric construction of J-equivariant Dijkgraaf-Witten theory as an extended topological field theory. The construction yields an explicitly accessible class of equivariant modular tensor categories. For the action of a group J on a group G, the category is described as the representation category of a J-ribbon algebra that generalizes the Drinfel'd double of the finite group G.
We explicitly construct a series of lattice models based upon the gauge group $Z_{p}$ which have the property of subdivision invariance, when the coupling parameter is quantized and the field configurations are restricted to satisfy a type of mod-$p$ flatness condition. The simplest model of this type yields the Dijkgraaf-Witten invariant of a $3$-manifold and is based upon a single link, or $1$-simplex, field. Depending upon the manifold's dimension, other models may have more than one species of field variable, and these may be based on higher dimensional simplices.
We introduce defects, with internal gauge symmetries, on a knot and Seifert surface to a knot into the combinatorial construction of finite gauge-group Dijkgraaf-Witten theory. The appropriate initial data for the construction are certain three object categories, with coefficients satisfying a partially degenerate cocycle condition.
We give a detailed account of the so-called "universal construction" that aims to extend invariants of closed manifolds, possibly with additional structure, to topological field theories and show that it amounts to a generalization of the GNS construction. We apply this construction to an invariant defined in terms of the groupoid cardinality of groupoids of bundles to recover Dijkgraaf-Witten theories, including the vector spaces obtained as a linearization of spaces of principal bundles.
Symmetries of three-dimensional topological field theories are naturally defined in terms of invertible topological surface defects. Symmetry groups are thus Brauer-Picard groups. We present a gauge theoretic realization of all symmetries of abelian Dijkgraaf-Witten theories. The symmetry group for a Dijkgraaf-Witten theory with gauge group a finite abelian group $A$, and with vanishing 3-cocycle, is generated by group automorphisms of $A$, by automorphisms of the trivial Chern-Simons 2-gerbe on the stack of $A$-bundles, and by partial e-m dualities. We show that transmission functors naturall…
We study representations of the braid groups from braiding gapped boundaries of Dijkgraaf-Witten theories and their twisted generalizations, which are (twisted) quantum doubled topological orders in two spatial dimensions. We show that the resulting braid (pure braid) representations are all monomial with respect to some specific bases, hence all such representation images of the braid groups are finite groups. We give explicit formulas for the monomial matrices and the ground state degeneracy of the Kitaev models that are Hamiltonian realizations of Dijkgraaf-Witten theories. Our results impl…
Given a finite $\mathbb{Z}_2$-graded group $\hat{\mathsf{G}}$ with ungraded subgroup $\mathsf{G}$ and a twisted cocycle $\hatλ \in Z^n(B \hat{\mathsf{G}}; \mathsf{U}(1)_π)$ which restricts to $λ\in Z^n(B \mathsf{G}; \mathsf{U}(1))$, we construct a lift of $λ$-twisted $\mathsf{G}$-Dijkgraaf--Witten theory to an unoriented topological quantum field theory. Our construction uses a new class of homotopy field theories, which we call orientation twisted. We also introduce an orientation twisted variant of the orbifold procedure, which produces an unoriented topological field theory from an orientat…
In this paper, we provide a construction of a state-sum model for finite gauge-group Dijkgraaf-Witten theory on surfaces with codimension 1 defects. The construction requires not only that the triangulation be subordinate to the filtration, but flag-like: each simplex of the triangulation is either disjoint from the defect curve, or intersects it in a closed face. The construction allows internal degrees of freedom in the defect curves by introducing a second gauge-group from which edges of the curve are labeled in the state-sum construction. Edges incident with the defect, but not lying in it…
We give an interpretation of Yetter's Invariant of manifolds $M$ in terms of the homotopy type of the function space $TOP(M,B(G))$, where $G$ is a crossed module and $B(G)$ is its classifying space. From this formulation, there follows that Yetter's invariant depends only on the homotopy type of $M$, and the weak homotopy type of the crossed module $G$. We use this interpretation to define a twisting of Yetter's Invariant by cohomology classes of crossed modules, defined as cohomology classes of their classifying spaces, in the form of a state sum invariant. In particular, we obtain an extensi…
We show that any twisted Dijkgraaf-Witten representation of a mapping class group of an orientable, compact surface with boundary has finite image. This generalizes work of Etingof, Rowell and Witherspoon showing that the braid group images are finite. In particular, our result answers their question regarding finiteness of images of arbitrary mapping class group representations in the affirmative. Our approach is to translate the problem into manipulation of colored graphs embedded in the given surface. To do this translation, we use the fact that any twisted Dijkgraaf-Witten representation a…
The quotient process of Müger and Bruguières is used to construct modular categories and TQFTs out of closed subsets of the Weyl alcove of a simple Lie algebra. In particular it is determined at which levels closed subsets associated to nonsimply-connected groups lead to TQFTs. Many of these TQFTs are shown to decompose into a tensor product of TQFTs coming from smaller subsets. The "prime" subsets among these are classified, and apart from some giving TQFTs depending on homology as described by Murakami, Ohtsuki and Okada, they are shown to be in one-to-one correspondence with the TQFTs predi…
We study discrete symmetries of Dijkgraaf-Witten theories and their gauging in the framework of (extended) functorial quantum field theory. Non-abelian group cohomology is used to describe discrete symmetries and we derive concrete conditions for such a symmetry to admit 't Hooft anomalies in terms of the Lyndon-Hochschild-Serre spectral sequence. We give an explicit realization of a discrete gauge theory with 't Hooft anomaly as a state on the boundary of a higher-dimensional Dijkgraaf-Witten theory. This allows us to calculate the 2-cocycle twisting the projective representation of physical …
A Group category is a spherical category whose simple objects are invertible. The invariant of Turaev-Viro with this particular category is in fact the invariant of Dijkgraaf-Witten whose the group and the 3-cocycle is given by the simple objects and the associativity constraint of the category.
We study algebras defined by identities in symmetric monoidal categories. Our focus is on Lie algebras. Besides usual Lie algebras, there are examples appearing in the study of knot invariants and Rozansky-Witten invariants. Our main result is a proof of Westbury's conjecture for K3-surface: there exists a Lie algebra homomorphism from Vogel's universal simple Lie algebra to the Lie algebra describing the Rozansky-Witten invariants of a K3-surface. Most of the paper involves setting up a proper language to discuss the problem and we formulate nine open questions as we proceed.
We show how to construct, starting from a quasi-Hopf algebra, or quasi-quantum group, invariants of knots and links. In some cases, these invariants give rise to invariants of the three-manifolds obtained by surgery along these links. This happens for a finite-dimensional quasi-quantum group, whose definition involves a finite group $G$, and a 3-cocycle $\om$, which was first studied by Dijkgraaf, Pasquier and Roche. We treat this example in more detail, and argue that in this case the invariants agree with the partition function of the topological field theory of Dijkgraaf and Witten dependin…
Dijkgraaf, Pasquier and Roche introduced twisted quantum doubles of a finite group in the context of conformal field theory. We study equivalences that arise among the braided monoidal categories associated to these quantum doubles, especially in the commutative case. This involves a close study of the cohomology of various complexes introduced by Eilenberg-MacLane. We show among other things that an equivalence of braided monoidal categories is the same as gauge equivalence of the corresponding quantum doubles, and that an invariant for an equivalence class is given by a metabolic quadratic s…
We define a universal state sum construction which specializes to most previously known state sums (Turaev-Viro, Dijkgraaf-Witten, Crane-Yetter, Douglas-Reutter, Witten-Reshetikhin-Turaev surgery formula, Brown-Arf). The input data for the state sum is an n-category satisfying various conditions, including finiteness, semisimplicity and n-pivotality. From this n-category one constructs an n+1-dimensional TQFT, and applying the TQFT gluing rules to a handle decomposition of an n+1-manifold produces the state sum.
We study a 2-functor that assigns to a bimodule category over a finite k-linear tensor category a k-linear abelian category. This 2-functor can be regarded as a category-valued trace for 1-morphisms in the tricategory of finite tensor categories. It is defined by a universal property that is a categorification of Hochschild homology of bimodules over an algebra. We present several equivalent realizations of this 2-functor and show that it has a coherent cyclic invariance. Our results have applications to categories associated to circles in three-dimensional topological field theories with defe…
We investigate the 3d lattice topological field theories defined by Chung, Fukuma and Shapere. We concentrate on the model defined by taking a deformation $\D{G}$ of the quantum double of a finite commutative group $G$ as the underlying Hopf algebra. It is suggested that Chung-Fukuma-Shapere partition function is related to that of Dijkgraaf-Witten by $\zcfs = |\zdw|^2$ when $G=\Z_{2N+1}$. For $G=\Z_{2N}$, such a relation does not hold.
Categories of Line Defects and Cohomological Hall Algebras
Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics（Perimeter理论物理研究所）；University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学）；Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院理论物理研究所）
In this paper I define the notion of a non-degenerate finitely semi-simple semi-strict spherical 2-category of non-zero dimension. Given such a 2-category I define a state-sum for any triangulated compact closed oriented 4-manifold and show that this state-sum does not depend on the chosen triangulation by proving invariance under the 4D Pachner moves. This invariant of piece-wise linear closed compact oriented 4-manifolds generalizes the Crane-Yetter invariant and probably it is also a generalization of the Crane-Frenkel invariant. As an example we show how to obtain a 2-category of the right…
These theories, which are surely some of the simplest possible quantum field theories, were introduced in a paper of Dijkgraaf and Witten. The path integral reduces to a finite sum, so it is quite amenable to direct mathematical study. Although the theory exisits in arbitrary dimensions, it is most interesting in $2+1$~dimensions, where it has a ``modular structure.'' This is related to quantum groups, and the precise details may give clues as to what happens in other contexts. This paper is written using AMSTeX 2.1, which can be obtained via ftp from the American Mathematical Society (instruc…
It has been conjectured that every $(2+1)$-TQFT is a Chern-Simons-Witten (CSW) theory labelled by a pair $(G,λ)$, where $G$ is a compact Lie group, and $λ\in H^4(BG;Z)$ a cohomology class. We study two TQFTs constructed from Jones' subfactor theory which are believed to be counterexamples to this conjecture: one is the quantum double of the even sectors of the $E_6$ subfactor, and the other is the quantum double of the even sectors of the Haagerup subfactor. We cannot prove mathematically that the two TQFTs are indeed counterexamples because CSW TQFTs, while physically defined, are not yet mat…
