Superselection sector theory of chiral topological order
Superselection sector theory of chiral topological order
Name of applicant
Boris Kjær
Title
Postdoctoral Fellow
Institution
Università di Trento
Amount
DKK 2,730,674
Year
2026
Type of grant
Internationalisation Fellowships
What?
Experimental discoveries like the fractional quantum Hall effect have challenged our understanding of phases of matter and led to new ideas such as higher categorical symmetry, now important in modern physics and mathematics. This project studies how such phenomena arise from simple microscopic interactions in many-body quantum systems, a problem known as the emergence of chiral topological order.
Why?
Obtaining a rigorous proof of the emergence of chiral topological order is a major goal in mathematical physics, because it would connect microscopic quantum physics with powerful abstract theories. These ideas have already contributed to the foundations of fault-tolerant quantum computation, and further mathematical advances may lead to new tools and approaches to quantum technologies.
How?
Recent advances in operator-algebraic approaches to quantum many-body systems have successfully described non-chiral topological phases. This project extends these methods using ideas from topological quantum field theory and higher categorical symmetries to develop a mathematical framework capable of treating the chiral case and explaining its emergence from microscopic interactions.