Stacking and the Triviality of Invertible Phases

Abstract

Abstract We study the superselection sectors of two quantum lattice systems stacked onto each other in the operator algebraic framework. We show in particular that all irreducible sectors of a stacked system are unitarily equivalent to a product of irreducible sectors of the factors. This naturally leads to a faithful functor between the categories for each system and the category of the stacked system. We construct an intermediate ‘product’ category which we then show is equivalent to the stacked system category. As a consequence, the sectors associated with an invertible state are trivial, namely invertible states support no anyonic quasi-particles.