Bosonic topological insulator in three dimensions and the statistical Witten effect

Abstract

It is well-known that one signature of the three-dimensional electron topological insulator is the Witten effect: if the system is coupled to a compact electromagnetic gauge field, a monopole in the bulk acquires a half-odd-integer polarization charge. In the present work, we propose a corresponding phenomenon for the topological insulator of bosons in 3d protected by particle number conservation and time-reversal symmetry. We claim that although a monopole inside a topological insulator of bosons can remain electrically neutral, its statistics are transmuted from bosonic to fermionic. We demonstrate that this ``statistical Witten effect" directly implies that if the surface of the topological insulator is neither gapless, nor spontaneously breaks the symmetry, it necessarily supports an intrinsic two-dimensional topological order. Moreover, the surface properties cannot be fully realized in a purely 2d system. We also confirm that the surface phases of the bosonic topological insulator proposed by Vishwanath and Senthil (arXiv:1209.3058) provide a consistent termination of a bulk exhibiting the statistical Witten effect. In a companion paper, we will provide an explicit field-theoretic, lattice-regularized, construction of the 3d topological insulator of bosons, employing a parton decomposition and subsequent condensation of parton-monopole composites.