Fermions without fermion fields

Abstract

It is shown that an arbitrary fermion hopping Hamiltonian can be mapped into a system with no fermion fields, generalizing an earlier model of Levin and Wen. All operators in the Hamiltonian of the resulting description commute (rather than anticommute) when acting at different sites, despite the system having excitations obeying Fermi statistics. While extra conserved degrees of freedom are introduced, they are all locally identified in the representation obtained. The same methods apply to Majorana (half) fermions, which for Cartesian lattices mitigate the fermion doubling problem. The generality of these results suggests that the observation of Fermion excitations in nature does not demand that anticommuting Fermion fields be fundamental