Unwinding short-range entanglement

Symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases are gapped phases of quantum matter protected by global symmetries that cannot be adiabatically deformed to a trivial phase without breaking symmetry. In this work, we show that, for several SPT phases that are short-range entangled (SRE), enlarging symmetries may effectively achieve the consequences of explicitly breaking symmetries. In other words, we demonstrate that nontrivial SPT phases can be unwound to trivial ones by symmetry extension - through a path where the Hilbert space is enlarged and the Hamiltonian is invariant under an extended symmetry group applying the idea of Wang, Wen, and Witten, Phys. Rev. X 8, 031048 (2018)10.1103/PhysRevX.8.031048. We show examples of both bosonic and fermionic SPT phases in 1+1 dimensions (1+1 D), including Haldane's bosonic spin chain and layers of Kitaev's fermionic Majorana chains. By adding degrees of freedom into the boundary/bulk, we can lift the zero mode degeneracy, or unwind the whole system. Furthermore, based on properties of Schur cover, we sketch a general picture of unwinding applicable to any (1+1)-D bosonic SPT phase protected by on-site finite symmetry. Altogether we show that SRE states can be unwound by symmetry breaking, inversion, and symmetry extension.