Coincidence Structures and Hard-Core Few-Body Interactions

The symmetry and topology of the coincidence structure, i.e. the locus of points in configuration space corresponding to particles in the same position, plays a critical role in extracting universal properties for few-body models with hard-core interactions. The coincidence structure is a scale-invariant union of manifolds possessing rich symmetry. When there are zero-range hard-core two-body interactions, the coincidence structure forms a nodal surface for finite-energy wave functions in configuration space. More generally, it acts like a defect that changes the topology of configuration space in a way that depends on the dimension of the underlying space, the total number of particles, and the number of particles in the hard-core interaction. For defects with co-dimension two, the coincidence manifold makes the configuration space is no longer simply-connected, and this provides a topological explanation for several models that exhibit anyonic behavior.