Zesting produces modular isotopes and explains their topological invariants

Abstract

We show that the ribbon zesting construction can produce modular isotopes -- different modular fusion categories with the same modular data. The result relies on the observation that the Reshetikhin-Turaev invariants of framed links associated to a ribbon fusion category satisfy a factorization property under zesting. This gives a new perspective on using topological invariants to classify topological order in light of modular data not being a complete invariant.