Symmetry classes

Abstract

This article examines the notion of ‘symmetry class’, which expresses the relevance of symmetries as an organizational principle. In his 1962 paper The threefold way: algebraic structure of symmetry groups and ensembles in quantum mechanics, Dyson introduced the prime classification of random matrix ensembles based on a quantum mechanical setting with symmetries. He described three types of independent irreducible ensembles: complex Hermitian, real symmetric, and quaternion self-dual. This article first reviews Dyson’s threefold way from a modern perspective before considering a minimal extension of his setting to incorporate the physics of chiral Dirac fermions and disordered superconductors. In this minimally extended setting, Hilbert space is replaced by Fock space equipped with the anti-unitary operation of particle-hole conjugation, and symmetry classes are in one-to-one correspondence with the large families of Riemannian symmetric spaces.