Stacking and the triviality of invertible phases

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.