Quanta Magazine

Physicists Aim to Classify All Possible Phases of

Matter
A complete classification could lead to a wealth of new materials and technologies. But some exotic
phases continue to resist understanding.

By Natalie Wolchover

Olena Shmahalo/Quanta Magazine

In the last three decades, condensed matter physicists have discovered a wonderland of exotic new
phases of matter: emergent, collective states of interacting particles that are nothing like the solids,
liquids and gases of common experience.

The phases, some realized in the lab and others identified as theoretical possibilities, arise when
matter is chilled almost to absolute-zero temperature, hundreds of degrees below the point at which
water freezes into ice. In these frigid conditions, particles can interact in ways that cause them to

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shed all traces of their original identities. Experiments in the 1980s revealed that in some situations
electrons split en masse into fractions of particles that make braidable trails through space-time; in
other cases, they collectively whip up massless versions of themselves. A lattice of spinning atoms
becomes a fluid of swirling loops or branching strings; crystals that began as insulators start
conducting electricity over their surfaces. One phase that shocked experts when recognized as a
mathematical possibility in 2011 features strange, particle-like “fractons” that lock together in
fractal patterns.

Now, research groups at Microsoft and elsewhere are racing to encode quantum information in the
braids and loops of some of these phases for the purpose of developing a quantum computer.
Meanwhile, condensed matter theorists have recently made major strides in understanding the
pattern behind the different collective behaviors that can arise, with the goal of enumerating and
classifying all possible phases of matter. If a complete classification is achieved, it would not only
account for all phases seen in nature so far, but also potentially point the way toward new materials
and technologies.

Led by dozens of top theorists, with input from mathematicians, researchers have already classified
a huge swath of phases that can arise in one or two spatial dimensions by relating them to topology:
the math that describes invariant properties of shapes like the sphere and the torus. They’ve also
begun to explore the wilderness of phases that can arise near absolute zero in 3-D matter.

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Max Gerber, courtesy of Caltech Development and Institute Relations

Xie Chen, a condensed matter theorist at the California Institute of Technology, says the “grand goal” of the
classification program is to enumerate all phases that can possibly arise from particles of any given type.

“It’s not a particular law of physics” that these scientists seek, said Michael Zaletel, a condensed
matter theorist at Princeton University. “It’s the space of all possibilities, which is a more beautiful
or deeper idea in some ways.” Perhaps surprisingly, Zaletel said, the space of all consistent phases is
itself a mathematical object that “has this incredibly rich structure that we think ends up, in 1-D and
2-D, in one-to-one correspondence with these beautiful topological structures.”

In the landscape of phases, there is “an economy of options,” said Ashvin Vishwanath of Harvard
University. “It all seems comprehensible” — a stroke of luck that mystifies him. Enumerating phases

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of matter could have been “like stamp collecting,” Vishwanath said, “each a little different, and with
no connection between the different stamps.” Instead, the classification of phases is “more like a
periodic table. There are many elements, but they fall into categories and we can understand the
categories.”

While classifying emergent particle behaviors might not seem fundamental, some experts, including
Xiao-Gang Wen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, say the new rules of emergent phases
show how the elementary particles themselves might arise from an underlying network of entangled
bits of quantum information, which Wen calls the “qubit ocean.” For example, a phase called a
“string-net liquid” that can emerge in a three-dimensional system of qubits has excitations that look
like all the known elementary particles. “A real electron and a real photon are maybe just
fluctuations of the string-net,” Wen said.

A New Topological Order

Before these zero-temperature phases cropped up, physicists thought they had phases all figured
out. By the 1950s, they could explain what happens when, for example, water freezes into ice, by
describing it as the breaking of a symmetry: Whereas liquid water has rotational symmetry at the
atomic scale (it looks the same in every direction), the H20 molecules in ice are locked in crystalline
rows and columns.

Things changed in 1982 with the discovery of phases called fractional quantum Hall states in an
ultracold, two-dimensional gas of electrons. These strange states of matter feature emergent
particles with fractions of an electron’s charge that take fractions of steps in a one-way march
around the perimeter of the system. “There was no way to use different symmetry to distinguish
those phases,” Wen said.

A new paradigm was needed. In 1989, Wen imagined phases like the fractional quantum Hall states
arising not on a plane, but on different topological manifolds — connected spaces such as the
surface of a sphere or a torus. Topology concerns global, invariant properties of such spaces that
can’t be changed by local deformations. Famously, to a topologist, you can turn a doughnut into a
coffee cup by simply deforming its surface, since both surfaces have one hole and are therefore
equivalent topologically. You can stretch and squeeze all you like, but even the most malleable
doughnut will refuse to become a pretzel.

Wen found that new properties of the zero-temperature phases were revealed in the different
topological settings, and he coined the term “topological order” to describe the essence of these
phases. Other theorists were also uncovering links to topology. With the discovery of many more
exotic phases — so many that researchers say they can barely keep up — it became clear that
topology, together with symmetry, offers a good organizing schema.

The topological phases only show up near absolute zero, because only at such low temperatures can
systems of particles settle into their lowest-energy quantum “ground state.” In the ground state, the
delicate interactions that correlate particles’ identities — effects that are destroyed at higher
temperatures — link up particles in global patterns of quantum entanglement. Instead of having
individual mathematical descriptions, particles become components of a more complicated function
that describes all of them at once, often with entirely new particles emerging as the excitations of
the global phase. The long-range entanglement patterns that arise are topological, or impervious to
local changes, like the number of holes in a manifold.

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Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

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Consider the simplest topological phase in a system — called a “quantum spin liquid” — that consists
of a 2-D lattice of “spins,” or particles that can point up, down, or some probability of each
simultaneously. At zero temperature, the spin liquid develops strings of spins that all point down,
and these strings form closed loops. As the directions of spins fluctuate quantum-mechanically, the
pattern of loops throughout the material also fluctuates: Loops of down spins merge into bigger
loops and divide into smaller loops. In this quantum-spin-liquid phase, the system’s ground state is
the quantum superposition of all possible loop patterns.

To understand this entanglement pattern as a type of topological order, imagine, as Wen did, that
the quantum spin liquid is spilling around the surface of a torus, with some loops winding around the
torus’s hole. Because of these hole windings, instead of having a single ground state associated with
the superposition of all loop patterns, the spin liquid will now exist in one of four distinct ground
states, tied to four different superpositions of loop patterns. One state consists of all possible loop
patterns with an even number of loops winding around the torus’s hole and an even number winding
through the hole. Another state has an even number of loops around the hole and an odd number
through the hole; the third and fourth ground states correspond to odd and even, and odd and odd,
numbers of hole windings, respectively.

Which of these ground states the system is in stays fixed, even as the loop pattern fluctuates locally.
If, for instance, the spin liquid has an even number of loops winding around the torus’s hole, two of
these loops might touch and combine, suddenly becoming a loop that doesn’t wrap around the hole
at all. Long-way loops decrease by two, but the number remains even. The system’s ground state is a
topologically invariant property that withstands local changes.

Future quantum computers could take advantage of this invariant quality. Having four topological
ground states that aren’t affected by local deformations or environmental error “gives you a way to
store quantum information, because your bit could be what ground state it’s in,” explained Zaletel,
who has studied the topological properties of spin liquids and other quantum phases. Systems like
spin liquids don’t really need to wrap around a torus to have topologically protected ground states. A
favorite playground of researchers is the toric code, a phase theoretically constructed by the
condensed matter theorist Alexei Kitaev of the California Institute of Technology in 1997 and
demonstrated in experiments over the past decade. The toric code can live on a plane and still
maintain the multiple ground states of a torus. (Loops of spins are essentially able to move off the
edge of the system and re-enter on the opposite side, allowing them to wind around the system like
loops around a torus’s hole.) “We know how to translate between the ground-state properties on a
torus and what the behavior of the particles would be,” Zaletel said.

Spin liquids can also enter other phases, in which spins, instead of forming closed loops, sprout
branching networks of strings. This is the string-net liquid phase that, according to Wen, “can
produce the Standard Model” of particle physics starting from a 3-D qubit ocean.

The Universe of Phases

Research by several groups in 2009 and 2010 completed the classification of “gapped” phases of
matter in one dimension, such as in chains of particles. A gapped phase is one with a ground state: a
lowest-energy configuration sufficiently removed or “gapped” from higher-energy states that the
system stably settles into it. Only gapped quantum phases have well-defined excitations in the form
of particles. Gapless phases are like swirling matter miasmas or quantum soups and remain largely
unknown territory in the landscape of phases.

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For a 1-D chain of bosons — particles like photons that have integer values of quantum spin, which
means they return to their initial quantum states after swapping positions — there is only one
gapped topological phase. In this phase, first studied by the Princeton theorist Duncan Haldane,
who, along with David Thouless and J. Michael Kosterlitz, won the 2016 Nobel Prize for decades of
work on topological phases, the spin chain gives rise to half-spin particles on both ends. Two gapped
topological phases exist for chains of fermions — particles like electrons and quarks that have half-
integer values of spin, meaning their states become negative when they switch positions. The
topological order in all these 1-D chains stems not from long-range quantum entanglement, but from
local symmetries acting between neighboring particles. Called “symmetry-protected topological
phases,” they correspond to “cocycles of the cohomology group,” mathematical objects related to
invariants like the number of holes in a manifold.

Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine, adapted from figure by Xiao-Gang Wen

Two-dimensional phases are more plentiful and more interesting. They can have what some experts
consider “true” topological order: the kind associated with long-range patterns of quantum
entanglement, like the fluctuating loop patterns in a spin liquid. In the last few years, researchers
have shown that these entanglement patterns correspond to topological structures called tensor
categories, which enumerate the different ways that objects can possibly fuse and braid around one
another. “The tensor categories give you a way [to describe] particles that fuse and braid in a
consistent way,” said David Pérez-García of Complutense University of Madrid.

Researchers like Pérez-García are working to mathematically prove that the known classes of 2-D
gapped topological phases are complete. He helped close the 1-D case in 2010, at least under the
widely-held assumption that these phases are always well-approximated by quantum field theories —
mathematical descriptions that treat the particles’ environments as smooth. “These tensor
categories are conjectured to cover all 2-D phases, but there is no mathematical proof yet,” Pérez-
García said. “Of course, it would be much more interesting if one can prove that this is not all. Exotic
things are always interesting because they have new physics, and they’re maybe useful.”

Gapless quantum phases represent another kingdom of possibilities to explore, but these
impenetrable fogs of matter resist most theoretical methods. “The language of particles is not useful,
and there are supreme challenges that we are starting to confront,” said Senthil Todadri, a
condensed matter theorist at MIT. Gapless phases present the main barrier in the quest to
understand high-temperature superconductivity, for instance. And they hinder quantum gravity

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researchers in the “it from qubit” movement, who believe that not only elementary particles, but also
space-time and gravity, arise from patterns of entanglement in some kind of underlying qubit ocean.
“In it from qubit, we spend much of our time on gapless states because this is where one gets
gravity, at least in our current understanding,” said Brian Swingle, a theoretical physicist at the
University of Maryland. Some researchers try to use mathematical dualities to convert the quantum-
soup picture into an equivalent particle description in one higher dimension. “It should be viewed in
the spirit of exploring,” Todadri said.

Even more enthusiastic exploration is happening in 3-D. What’s already clear is that, when spins and
other particles spill from their chains and flatlands and fill the full three spatial dimensions of
reality, unimaginably strange patterns of quantum entanglement can emerge. “In 3-D, there are
things that escape, so far, this tensor-category picture,” said Pérez-García. “The excitations are very
wild.”

The Haah Code

The very wildest of the 3-D phases appeared seven years ago. A talented Caltech graduate student
named Jeongwan Haah discovered the phase in a computer search while looking for what’s known as
the “dream code”: a quantum ground state so robust that it can be used to securely store quantum
memory, even at room temperature.

For this, Haah had to turn to 3-D matter. In 2-D topological phases like the toric code, a significant
source of error is “stringlike operators”: perturbations to the system that cause new strings of spins
to accidentally form. These strings will sometimes wind new loops around the torus’s hole, bumping
the number of windings from even to odd or vice versa and converting the toric code to one of its
three other quantum ground states. Because strings grow uncontrollably and wrap around things,
experts say there cannot be good quantum memories in 2-D.

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Jeremy Mashburn

Jeongwan Haah, a condensed matter theorist now working at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington,
discovered a bizarre 3-D phase of matter with fractal properties.

Haah wrote an algorithm to search for 3-D phases that avoid the usual kinds of stringlike operators.
The computer coughed up 17 exact solutions that he then studied by hand. Four of the phases were
confirmed to be free of stringlike operators; the one with the highest symmetry was what’s now
known as the Haah code.

As well as being potentially useful for storing quantum memory, the Haah code was also profoundly
weird. Xie Chen, a condensed matter theorist at Caltech, recalled hearing the news as a graduate
student in 2011, within a month or two of Haah’s disorienting discovery. “Everyone was totally
shocked,” she said. “We didn’t know anything we could do about it. And now, that’s been the
situation for many years.”

The Haah code is relatively simple on paper: It’s the solution of a two-term energy formula,
describing spins that interact with their eight nearest neighbors in a cubic lattice. But the resulting
phase “strains our imaginations,” Todadri said.

The code features particle-like entities called fractons that, unlike the loopy patterns in, say, a
quantum spin liquid, are nonliquid and locked in place; the fractons can only hop between positions
in the lattice if those positions are operated upon in a fractal pattern. That is, you have to inject
energy into the system at each corner of, say, a tetrahedron connecting four fractons in order to
make them switch positions, but when you zoom in, you see that what you treated as a point-like
corner was actually the four corners of a smaller tetrahedron, and you have to inject energy into the
corners of that one as well. At a finer scale, you see an even smaller tetrahedron, and so on, all the
way down to the finest scale of the lattice. This fractal behavior means that the Haah code never
forgets the underlying lattice it comes from, and it can never be approximated by a smoothed-out
description of the lattice, as in a quantum field theory. What’s more, the number of ground states in
the Haah code grows with the size of the underlying lattice — a decidedly non-topological property.
(Stretch a torus, and it’s still a torus.)

The quantum state of the Haah code is extraordinarily secure, since a “fractal operator” that
perfectly hits all the marks is unlikely to come along at random. Experts say a realizable version of
the code would be of great technological interest.

Haah’s phase has also generated a surge of theoretical speculation. Haah helped matters along in
2015 when he and two collaborators at MIT discovered many examples of a class of phases now
known as “fracton models” that are simpler cousins of the Haah code. (The first model in this family
was introduced by Claudio Chamon of Boston University in 2005.) Chen and others have since been
studying the topology of these fracton systems, some of which permit particles to move along lines
or sheets within a 3-D volume and might aid conceptual understanding or be easier to realize
experimentally. “It’s opening the door to many more exotic things,” Chen said of the Haah code. “It’s
an indication about how little we know about 3-D and higher dimensions. And because we don’t yet
have a systematic picture of what is going on, there might be a lot of things lying out there waiting
to be explored.”

No one knows yet where the Haah code and its cousins belong in the landscape of possible phases,

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or how much bigger this space of possibilities might be. According to Todadri, the community has
made progress in classifying the simplest gapped 3-D phases, but more exploration is needed in 3-D
before a program of complete classification can begin there. What’s clear, he said, is that “when the
classification of gapped phases of matter is taken up in 3-D, it will have to confront these weird
possibilities that Haah first discovered.”

Many researchers think new classifying concepts, and even whole new frameworks, might be
necessary to capture the Haah code’s fractal nature and reveal the full scope of possibilities for 3-D
quantum matter. Wen said, “You need a new type of theory, new thinking.” Perhaps, he said, we
need a new picture of nonliquid patterns of long-range entanglement. “We have some vague ideas
but don’t have a very systematic mathematics to do them,” he said. “We have some feeling what it
looks like. The detailed systematics are still lacking. But that’s exciting.”

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