Boundary Hamiltonian theory for gapped topological orders

Abstract: In this letter, we report our systematic construction of the lattice Hamiltonian model of topological orders on open surfaces, with explicit boundary terms. We do this mainly for the Levin-Wen stringnet model. The full Hamiltonian in our approach yields a topologically protected, gapped energy spectrum, with the corresponding wave functions robust under topology-preserving transformations of the lattice of the system. We explicitly present the wavefunctions of the ground states and boundary elementary excitations. We construct the creation and hopping operators of boundary quasi-particles. We find that given a bulk topological order, the gapped boundary conditions are classified by Frobenius algebras in its input data. Emergent topological properties of the ground states and boundary excitations are characterized by (bi-) modules over Frobenius algebras.