Cornering relative symmetry theories

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The symmetry data of a <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><a:mi>d</a:mi></a:math>-dimensional quantum field theory (QFT) can often be captured in terms of a higher-dimensional symmetry topological field theory. In top-down (i.e., stringy) realizations of this structure, the QFT in question is localized in a higher-dimensional bulk. In many cases of interest, however, the associated (<c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><c:mrow><c:mi>d</c:mi><c:mo>+</c:mo><c:mn>1</c:mn></c:mrow></c:math>)-dimensional bulk is not fully gapped and one must instead consider a filtration of theories to reach a gapped bulk in <e:math xmlns:e="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><e:mi>D</e:mi><e:mo>=</e:mo><e:mi>d</e:mi><e:mo>+</e:mo><e:mi>m</e:mi></e:math> dimensions. Overall, this leads us to a nested structure of relative symmetry theories which descend to coupled edge modes, with the original QFT degrees of freedom localized at a corner of this <g:math xmlns:g="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline"><g:mi>D</g:mi></g:math>-dimensional bulk system. We present a bottom-up characterization of this structure and also show how it naturally arises in a number of string-based constructions of QFTs with both finite and continuous symmetries.