Quantum Many-Body Lattice C-R-T Symmetry: Fractionalization, Anomaly, and Symmetric Mass Generation

Abstract

Charge conjugation (C), mirror reflection (R), and time reversal (T) symmetries, along with internal symmetries, are essential for massless Majorana and Dirac fermions. These symmetries are sufficient to rule out potential fermion bilinear mass terms, thereby establishing a gapless free fermion fixed point phase, pivotal for symmetric mass generation (SMG) transition. In this work, we systematically study the anomaly of C-R-T-internal symmetry in all spacetime dimensions by analyzing the projective representation (i.e. the fractionalization) of the C-R-T-internal symmetry group in the quantum many-body Hilbert space on the lattice. By discovering the fermion-flavor-number-dependent C-R-T-internal symmetry's anomaly structure, we demonstrate an alternative way to derive the minimal flavor number for SMG, which shows consistency with known results from Kähler-Dirac fermion or cobordism classification. Our findings reveal that, in general spatial dimensions, either 8 copies of staggered Majorana fermions or 4 copies of staggered Dirac fermions admit SMG. By directly searching for 4-fermion interactions that form commuting stabilizers respecting all symmetry constraints, we can prove the explicit SMG gapping retained a unique ground state in the codespace. Furthermore, we establish the correspondence between the symmetry operators of staggered fermions and free fermions, which is instrumental in facilitating the analysis of symmetry fractionalization at the field theory level.