An angle between intermediate subfactors and its rigidity

We introduce a new notion of an angle between intermediate subfactors and prove various interesting properties of the angle and relate it to the Jones index. We prove a uniform 60 to 90 degree bound for the angle between minimal intermediate subfactors of a finite index irreducible subfactor. From this rigidity we can bound the number of minimal (or maximal) intermediate subfactors by the kissing number in geometry. As a consequence, the number of intermediate subfactors of an irreducible subfactor has at most exponential growth with respect to the Jones index. This answers a question of Longo’s published in 2003.