Jia Yiyang

@physicsnewbie, Yeah it's a nice campus and a comfortable place to live at. However I have mixed feelings about our physics department. Professors are generally nice persons, but there's practically no theoretical research at all. The high ranking results from a heavy investment in highly citable branches such as experimental material science, nanotech and laser stuff. Besides, QS ranking isn't all that convincing, just look at where it has ranked KTH and Stony Brook, Rutgers....

Wow, Nanyang Technological University is a very beautiful looking campus. It's pretty shocking to discover that it's less than 25 years old, yet its physics department is ranked at 40 in the world already:

http://www.topuniversities.com/university-rankings/university-subject-rankings/2015/physics-astronomy#sorting=rank+region=+country=+faculty=+stars=false+search=

By the way, you might want to delete the double-post.

Hi Yiyang - You posted the comment as "preformatted text"; fixed it.

There's really nothing wrong with changing SE links to PO ones, just like there's nothing wrong in nativising posts, but OK, deleted and posted a new comment.

Regarding the conversion of the comment to the answer:

Quite surprising - I too have seen that answer as a comment, but have certainly not converted it. I hope I didn't type a wrong comment ID in the Comment2Answer converter (which I thought I used today on one of my own comments)! Very sorry, I've now converted it back.

Hi Jia Yiyang,

As you've participated in the close vote queue before, just wanted to tell you that there are a few questions in the close vote queue and you may be interested in voting to close or reopen them:

http://physicsoverflow.org/4533

Hi Jia,

if you want to vote to close, you can also answer here
http://www.physicsoverflow.org/4533
which is better than only comment below the question.

@RonMaimon, Sorry I did not see this wall post earlier. Thanks for your interest in the paper. I am probably not able to write a review in the near future, I am relatively familiar with the lattice gauge theory part, but all the SPT phases stuff  Wen used is beyond my comfort zone and I definitely need time to study it, and recently I'm quite busy preparing PhD applications.

I skimmed Xiao's paper, and it looks actually correct and excellent. The rejection is simply through incredulity that you can formulate an anomaly free theory so naturally. I personally suspected that this is possible by mixing the anomaly cancelling flavors, but I never sat down to do it, and I think he did it right. I haven't read it in depth to give a full review, but I think it is correct and original (and important), but I am not 100% sure because I haven't reproduced the calculations he did, so I don't want to say so prematurely. I'll try to get to it, but maybe you can write a review too, or someone else. The referee comments in this case were brain-dead.