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 non-trivial 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 in arXiv:1705.06728. We show examples of both bosonic and fermionic SPT phases in 1+1 dimensions, 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.

We explore the fine structure of the holographic entanglement entropy proposal (the Ryu-Takayanagi formula) in AdS$_3$/CFT$_{2}$. With the guidance from the boundary and bulk modular flows we find a natural slicing of the entanglement wedge with the modular planes, which are co-dimension one bulk surfaces tangent to the modular flow everywhere. This gives an one-to-one correspondence between the points on the boundary interval $\mathcal{A}$ and the points on the Ryu-Takayanagi (RT) surface $\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}$. In the same sense an arbitrary subinterval $\mathcal{A}_2$ of $\mathcal{A}$ will correspond to a subinterval $\mathcal{E}_2$ of $\mathcal{E}_{\mathcal{A}}$. This fine correspondence indicates that the length of $\mathcal{E}_2$ captures the contribution $s_{\mathcal{A}}(\mathcal{A}_2)$ from $\mathcal{A}_2$ to the entanglement entropy $S_{\mathcal{A}}$, hence gives the contour function for entanglement entropy. Furthermore we propose that $s_{\mathcal{A}}(\mathcal{A}_2)$ in general can be written as a simple linear combination of entanglement entropies of single intervals inside $\mathcal{A}$. This proposal passes several non-trivial tests.

We apply quantum gravitational results to spatially unbounded Friedmann universes and try to answer some questions related to dark energy, dark matter, inflation and the missing antimatter.

We hypothesize a new and more complete set of anomalies of certain quantum field theories (QFTs) and then give an eclectic proof. First, we propose a set of 't Hooft anomalies of 2d $\mathbb{CP}^{\mathrm{N}-1}$-sigma models at $\theta=\pi$, with N $=2,3,4$ and others, by enlisting all possible 3d cobordism invariants and selecting the matched terms. Second, we propose a set of 't Hooft higher anomalies of 4d time-reversal symmetric SU(N)-Yang-Mills (YM) gauge theory at $\theta=\pi$, via 5d cobordism invariants (higher symmetry-protected topological states) such that compactifying YM theory on a 2-torus matches the constrained 3d cobordism invariants from sigma models. Based on algebraic/geometric topology, QFT analysis, manifold generator dimensional reduction, condensed matter inputs and additional physics criteria, we derive a correspondence between 5d and 3d new invariants, thus broadly prove a more complete anomaly-matching between 4d YM and 2d $\mathbb{CP}^{\mathrm{N}-1}$ models via a twisted 2-torus reduction, done by taking the Poincar\'e dual of specific cohomology class with $\mathbb{Z}_2$ coefficients. We formulate a higher-symmetry analog of "Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem" to constrain the low-energy dynamics.

We quantize the Hamilton equations instead of the Hamilton condition. The resulting equation has the simple form $-\D u=0$ in a fiber bundle, where the Laplacian is the Laplacian of the Wheeler-DeWitt metric provided $n\not=4$. Using then separation of variables the solutions $u$ can be expressed as products of temporal and spatial eigenfunctions, where the spatial eigenfunctions are eigenfunctions of the Laplacian in the symmetric space $SL(n,\R[])/SO(n)$. Since one can define a Schwartz space and tempered distributions in $SL(n,\R[])/SO(n)$ as well as a Fourier transform, Fourier quantization can be applied such that the spatial eigenfunctions are transformed to Dirac measures and the spatial Laplacian to a multiplication operator.