Gapless edges of 2d topological orders and enriched monoidal categories

In this work, we give a precise mathematical description of a fully chiral gapless edge of a 2d topological order (without symmetry). We show that the observables on the 1+1D world sheet of such an edge consist of a family of topological edge excitations, boundary CFT's and walls between boundary CFT's. These observables can be described by a chiral algebra and an enriched monoidal category. This mathematical description automatically includes that of gapped edges as special cases. Therefore, it gives a unified framework to study both gapped and gapless edges. Moreover, the boundary-bulk duality also holds for gapless edges. More precisely, the unitary modular tensor category that describes the 2d bulk phase is exactly the Drinfeld center of the enriched monoidal category that describes the gapless/gapped edge. We propose a classification of all gapped and fully chiral gapless edges of a given bulk phase. In the end, we explain how modular-invariant bulk conformal field theories naturally emerge on certain gapless walls between two trivial phases.Comment: 26 pages, 8 figures, An explanation of the appearance of boundary CFT's on a chiral gapless edge, which is based on a generalized "no-go theorem", is added. Final versio

A trace formula for the forcing relation of braids

The forcing relation of braids has been introduced for a 2-dimensional analogue of the Sharkovskii order on periods for maps of the interval. In this paper, by making use of the Nielsen fixed point theory and a representation of braid groups, we deduce a trace formula for the computation of the forcing order.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure