Ground-State Degeneracy of Topological Phases on Open Surfaces

Abstract

We relate the ground state degeneracy of a non-Abelian topological phase on a surface with boundaries to the anyon condensates that break the topological phase into a trivial phase. Specifically, we propose that gapped boundary conditions of the surface are in one-to-one correspondence with the sets of condensates, each being able to completely break the phase, and we substantiate this by examples. The ground state degeneracy resulting from a particular boundary condition coincides with the number of confined topological sectors due to the corresponding condensation. These lead to a generalization of the Laughlin-Tao-Wu charge-pumping argument for Abelian fractional quantum Hall states to encompass non-Abelian topological phases, in the sense that an anyon loop of a confined anyon winding a nontrivial cycle can pump a condensed anyon from one boundary to another. Such generalized pumping may find applications in quantum control of anyons, eventually realizing topological quantum computation.