No Arabic abstract
Understanding the behaviour of topologically ordered lattice systems at finite temperature is a way of assessing their potential as fault-tolerant quantum memories. We compute the natural extension of the topological entanglement entropy for T > 0, namely the subleading correction $I_{textrm{topo}}$ to the area law for mutual information. Its dependence on T can be written, for Abelian Kitaev models, in terms of information-theoretic functions and readily identifiable scaling behaviour, from which the interplay between volume, temperature, and topological order, can be read. These arguments are extended to non-Abelian quantum double models, and numerical results are given for the $D(S_3)$ model, showing qualitative agreement with the Abelian case.
Integrable models such as the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain, the Lieb-Liniger or the one-dimensional Hubbard model are known to avoid thermalization, which was also demonstrated in several quantum-quench experiments. Another dramatic consequence of integrability is the zero-frequency anomaly in transport coefficients, which results in ballistic finite-temperature transport, despite the presence of strong interactions. While this aspect of nonergodic dynamics has been known for a long time, there has so far not been any unambiguous experimental realization thereof. We make a concrete proposal for the observation ballistic transport via local quantum quench experiments in fermionic quantum-gas microscopes. Such an experiment would also unveil the coexistence of ballistic and diffusive transport channels in one and the same system and provide a means of measuring finite-temperature Drude weights. The connection between local quenches and linear-response functions is established via time-dependent Einstein relations.
Entanglement entropy in free scalar field theory at its ground state is dominated by an area law term. However, when mixed states are considered this property ceases to exist. We show that in such cases the mutual information obeys an area law. The proportionality constant connecting the area to the mutual information has an interesting dependence on the temperature. At infinite temperature it tends to a finite value which coincides with the classical calculation.
We present an approach to identify topological order based on unbiased infinite projected entangled-pair states (iPEPS) simulations, i.e. where we do not impose a virtual symmetry on the tensors during the optimization of the tensor network ansatz. As an example we consider the ground state of the toric code model in a magnetic field exhibiting $Z_2$ topological order. The optimization is done by an efficient energy minimization approach based on a summation of tensor environments to compute the gradient. We show that the optimized tensors, when brought into the right gauge, are approximately $Z_2$ symmetric, and they can be fully symmetrized a posteriori to generate a stable topologically ordered state, yielding the correct topological entanglement entropy and modular S and U matrices. To compute the latter we develop a variant of the corner-transfer matrix method which is computationally more efficient than previous approaches based on the tensor renormalization group.
We calculate exactly the von Neumann and topological entropies of the toric code as a function of system size and temperature. We do so for systems with infinite energy scale separation between magnetic and electric excitations, so that the magnetic closed loop structure is fully preserved while the electric loop structure is tampered with by thermally excited electric charges. We find that the entanglement entropy is a singular function of temperature and system size, and that the limit of zero temperature and the limit of infinite system size do not commute. From the entanglement entropy we obtain the topological entropy, which is shown to drop to half its zero-temperature value for any infinitesimal temperature in the thermodynamic limit, and remains constant as the temperature is further increased. Such discontinuous behavior is replaced by a smooth decreasing function in finite-size systems. If the separation of energy scales in the system is large but finite, we argue that our results hold at small enough temperature and finite system size, and a second drop in the topological entropy should occur as the temperature is raised so as to disrupt the magnetic loop structure by allowing the appearance of free magnetic charges. We interpret our results as an indication that the underlying magnetic and electric closed loop structures contribute equally to the topological entropy (and therefore to the topological order) in the system. Since each loop structure emph{per se} is a classical object, we interpret the quantum topological order in our system as arising from the ability of the two structures to be superimposed and appear simultaneously.
A quantum tricritical point is shown to exists in coupled time-reversal symmetry (TRS) broken Majorana chains. The tricriticality separates topologically ordered, symmetry protected topological (SPT), and trivial phases of the system. Here we demonstrate that the breaking of the TRS manifests itself in an emergence of a new dimensionless scale, $g = alpha(xi) B sqrt{N}$, where $N$ is the system size, $B$ is a generic TRS breaking field, and $alpha(xi)$, with $alpha(0)equiv 1$, is a model-dependent function of the localization length, $xi$, of boundary Majorana zero modes at the tricriticality. This scale determines the scaling of the finite size corrections around the tricriticality, which are shown to be {it universal}, and independent of the nature of the breaking of the TRS. We show that the single variable scaling function, $f(w)$, $wpropto m N$, where $m$ is the excitation gap, that defines finite-size corrections to the ground state energy of the system around topological phase transition at $B=0$, becomes double-scaling, $f=f(w,g)$, at finite $B$. We realize TRS breaking through three different methods with completely different lattice details and find the same universal behavior of $f(w,g)$. In the critical regime, $m=0$, the function $f(0,g)$ is nonmonotonic, and reproduces the Ising conformal field theory scaling only in limits $g=0$ and $grightarrow infty$. The obtained result sets a scale of $N gg 1/(alpha B)^2$ for the system to reach the thermodynamic limit in the presence of the TRS breaking. We derive the effective low-energy theory describing the tricriticality and analytically find the asymptotic behavior of the finite-size scaling function. Our results show that the boundary entropy around the tricriticality is also a universal function of $g$ at $m=0$.