Background

During the last thirty years, the experimental discovery of fractional quantum hall effect (FQHE) and topological insulator (TI) have led to intensive studies of topological phases of quantum matter. In the meanwhile, it was realized that topological phases of quantum matter could be characterized by topological quantum field theory (TQFT), which has influenced the very recent development of mathematical physics. Now, all these studies have brought huge impact on modern physics.

Recent studies have further suggested that new types of topological phases of quantum matter may exist in 3D, which might lead to a revolution in TQFT and mathematical physics. Naively, one might argue that in 3D, there is no interesting topological phase with fractionalized statistics, since a point-like particle must carry either boson or fermion statistics. To our surprise, it has been recently shown that extended objects – flux lines, can also carry fractionalized braiding statistics. Therefore, it is important to understand the generic properties and the corresponding precise mathematical language for 3D topologically ordered phases. Since it is well known that the fusion rules for string-like objects are closely related to the 2-category theory, developing a modular 2-category theory could be very promising. In particular, string-like objects with non-Abelian statistics would be extremely interesting for topological quantum computation.

 

Date

December 20, 2017 to January 10, 2018

 

Venue

Room G25, G/F., Science Centre North Block, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong

 

Invited Speakers

Prof. Xie Chen, California Institute of Technology, USA

Prof. Meng Cheng, Yale University, USA

Prof. Dmitri Feldman, Brown University, USA

Prof. Michael Hermele, University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

Prof. Anton Kapustin, California Institute of Technology, USA

Prof. Dung-Hai Lee, University of California at UC Berkeley, USA

Prof. Masaki Oshikawa, University of Tokyo, Japan

Prof. Yang Qi, Fudan University, China

Dr. Chenjie Wang, Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Canada

Prof. Xiao-Gang Wen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

 

Organizing Committee

Prof. Zhengcheng Gu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Prof. Naichung Conan Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Prof. Xiao-Gang Wen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA

 

Registration Fee

Free (invited only)

 

Organizer

Department of Physics and Institute of Theoretical Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

Sponsor

Institute of Theoretical Physics, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

 

For Enquiries

Please contact Ms. P. Y. Ho at pyho@phy.cuhk.edu.hk.