Symmetry protected topological orders and the group cohomology of their symmetry group

Symmetry protected topological (SPT) phases are gapped short-range-entangled quantum phases with a symmetry G. They can all be smoothly connected to the same trivial product state if we break the symmetry. The Haldane phase of spin-1 chain is the first example of SPT phases which is protected by SO(3) spin rotation symmetry. The topological insulator is another example of SPT phases which are protected by U(1) and time-reversal symmetries. In this paper, we show that interacting bosonic SPT phases can be systematically described by group cohomology theory: Distinct d-dimensional bosonic SPT phases with on-site symmetry G (which may contain antiunitary time-reversal symmetry) can be labeled by the elements in H1+d[G,U-T(1)], the Borel (1 + d)-group-cohomology classes of G over the G module U-T(1). Our theory, which leads to explicit ground-state wave functions and commuting projector Hamiltonians, is based on a new type of topological term that generalizes the topological theta term in continuous nonlinear sigma models to lattice nonlinear sigma models. The boundary excitations of the nontrivial SPT phases are described by lattice nonlinear sigma models with a nonlocal Lagrangian term that generalizes the Wess-Zumino-Witten term for continuous nonlinear sigma models. As a result, the symmetry G must be realized as a non-on-site symmetry for the low-energy boundary excitations, and those boundary states must be gapless or degenerate. As an application of our result, we can use H1+d[U(1) (sic) Z(2)(T),U-T(1)] to obtain interacting bosonic topological insulators (protected by time reversal Z(2)(T) and boson number conservation), which contain one nontrivial phase in one-dimensional (1D) or 2D and three in 3D. We also obtain interacting bosonic topological superconductors (protected by time-reversal symmetry only), in term of H1+d[Z(2)(T),U-T(1)], which contain one nontrivial phase in odd spatial dimensions and none for even dimensions. Our result is much more general than the above two examples, since it is for any symmetry group. For example, we can use H1+d[U(1) x Z(2)(T),U-T(1)] to construct the SPT phases of integer spin systems with time-reversal and U(1) spin rotation symmetry, which contain three nontrivial SPT phases in 1D, none in 2D, and seven in 3D. Even more generally, we find that the different bosonic symmetry breaking short-range-entangled phases are labeled by the following three mathematical objects: (G(H),G(Psi),H1+d[G(Psi),U-T(1)]), where G(H) is the symmetry group of the Hamiltonian and G(Psi) the symmetry group of the ground states. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.87.155114