Categorical Landau Paradigm for Gapped Phases

Abstract

We propose a unified framework to classify gapped infra-red (IR) phases with categorical symmetries, leading to a generalized, categorical Landau paradigm. This is applicable in any dimension and gives a succinct, comprehensive, and computationally powerful approach to classifying gapped symmetric phases. The key tool is the symmetry topological field theory (SymTFT), which is a one dimension higher TFT with two boundaries, which we choose both to be topological. We illustrate the general idea for (1+1)d gapped phases with categorical symmetries and suggest higher-dimensional extensions.