Confinement and Flux Attachment

Abstract: Flux-attached theories are a novel class of lattice gauge theories whose gauge constraints involve both electric and magnetic operators. Like ordinary gauge theories, they possess confining phases. Unlike ordinary gauge theories, their confinement does not imply a trivial gapped vacuum. This paper will offer three lessons about the confining phases of flux-attached $\mathbb Z_K$ theories in two spatial dimensions. First, on an arbitrary orientable lattice, flux attachment that satisfies a simple, explicitly derived criterion leads to a confining theory whose low-energy behavior is captured by an action of a general Chern-Simons form. Second, on a square lattice, this criterion can be solved, and all theories that satisfy it can be enumerated. The simplest such theory has an action given by a difference of two Chern-Simons terms, and it features a kind of subsystem symmetry that causes its topological entanglement entropy to behave pathologically. Third, the simplest flux-attached theory on a square lattice that does not satisfy the above criterion is exactly solvable when the gauge group is $\mathbb Z_2$. On a torus, its confined phase possesses a twofold topological degeneracy that stems from a sum over spin structures in a dual fermionic theory. This makes this flux-attached $\mathbb Z_2$ theory an appealing candidate for a microscopic description of a $\mathrm U(1)_2$ Chern-Simons theory.