In physics, topological order describes a state or phase of matter that arises in a system with non-local interactions, such as entanglement in quantum mechanics, and floppy modes in elastic systems. Whereas classical phases of matter such as gases and solids correspond to microscopic patterns in the spatial arrangement of particles arising from short range interactions, topological orders correspond to patterns of long-range quantum entanglement. States with different topological orders (or different patterns of long range entanglements) cannot change into each other without a phase transition.

Technically, topological order occurs at zero temperature. Various topologically ordered states have interesting properties, such as (1) ground state degeneracy and fractional statistics or non-abelian group statistics that can be used to realize a topological quantum computer; (2) perfect conducting edge states that may have important device applications; (3) emergent gauge field and Fermi statistics that suggest a quantum information origin of elementary particles; (4) topological entanglement entropy that reveals the entanglement origin of topological order, etc. Topological order is important in the study of several physical systems such as spin liquids, and the quantum Hall effect, along with potential applications to fault-tolerant quantum computation.

Topological insulators and topological superconductors (beyond 1D) do not have topological order as defined above, their entanglements being only short-ranged, but are examples of symmetry-protected topological order.

Matter composed of atoms can have different properties and appear in different forms, such as solid, liquid, superfluid, etc. These various forms of matter are often called states of matter or phases. According to condensed matter physics and the principle of emergence, the different properties of materials generally arise from the different ways in which the atoms are organized in the materials. Those different organizations of the atoms (or other particles) are formally called the orders in the materials.

Atoms can organize in many ways which lead to many different orders and many different types of materials. Landau symmetry-breaking theory provides a general understanding of these different orders. It points out that different orders really correspond to different symmetries in the organizations of the constituent atoms. As a material changes from one order to another order (i.e., as the material undergoes a phase transition), what happens is that the symmetry of the organization of the atoms changes.

For example, atoms have a random distribution in a liquid, so a liquid remains the same as we displace atoms by an arbitrary distance. We say that a liquid has a continuous translation symmetry. After a phase transition, a liquid can turn into a crystal. In a crystal, atoms organize into a regular array (a lattice). A lattice remains unchanged only when we displace it by a particular distance (integer times a lattice constant), so a crystal has only discrete translation symmetry. The phase transition between a liquid and a crystal is a transition that reduces the continuous translation symmetry of the liquid to the discrete symmetry of the crystal. Similarly this holds for rotational symmetry. Such a change in symmetry is called symmetry breaking. The essence of the difference between liquids and crystals is therefore that the organizations of atoms have different symmetries in the two phases.

Landau symmetry-breaking theory has been a very successful theory. For a long time, physicists believed that Landau Theory described all possible orders in materials, and all possible (continuous) phase transitions.

However, since the late 1980s, it has become gradually apparent that Landau symmetry-breaking theory may not describe all possible orders. In an attempt to explain high temperature superconductivity the chiral spin state was introduced. At first, physicists still wanted to use Landau symmetry-breaking theory to describe the chiral spin state. They identified the chiral spin state as a state that breaks the time reversal and parity symmetries, but not the spin rotation symmetry. This should be the end of the story according to Landau's symmetry breaking description of orders. However, it was quickly realized that there are many different chiral spin states that have exactly the same symmetry, so symmetry alone was not enough to characterize different chiral spin states. This means that the chiral spin states contain a new kind of order that is beyond the usual symmetry description. The proposed, new kind of order was named "topological order". The name "topological order" is motivated by the low energy effective theory of the chiral spin states which is a topological quantum field theory (TQFT). New quantum numbers, such as ground state degeneracy (which can be defined on a closed space or an open space with gapped boundaries, including both Abelian topological orders and non-Abelian topological orders) and the non-Abelian geometric phase of degenerate ground states, were introduced to characterize and define the different topological orders in chiral spin states. More recently, it was shown that topological orders can also be characterized by topological entropy.