Noninvertible anomalies and mapping-class-group transformation of anomalous partition functions

Abstract

Recently, it was realized that anomalies can be completely classified by topological orders, symmetry protected topological (SPT) orders, and symmetry enriched topological orders in one higher dimension. The anomalies that people used to study are invertible anomalies that correspond to invertible topological orders and/or symmetry protected topological orders in one higher dimension. In this paper, we introduce a notion of non-invertible anomaly, which describes the boundary of generic topological order. A key feature of non-invertible anomaly is that it has several partition functions. Under the mapping class group transformation of space-time, those partition functions transform in a certain way characterized by the data of the corresponding topological order in one higher dimension. In fact, the anomalous partition functions transform in the same way as the degenerate ground states of the corresponding topological order in one higher dimension. This general theory of non-invertible anomaly may have wide applications. As an example, we show that the irreducible gapless boundary of 2+1D double-semion (DS) topological order must have central charge $c=\bar c \geq \frac{25}{28}$.