No Arabic abstract
A given fractional quantum Hall state may admit multiple, distinct edge phases on its boundary. We explore the implications that multiple edge phases have for the entanglement spectrum and entropy of a given bulk state. We describe the precise manner in which the entanglement spectrum depends upon local (tunneling) interactions along an entanglement cut and throughout the bulk. The sensitivity to local conditions near the entanglement cut appears not only in gross features of the spectrum, but can also manifest itself in an additive, positive constant correction to the topological entanglement entropy, i.e., it increases its magnitude. A natural interpretation for this result is that the tunneling interactions across an entanglement cut can function as a barrier to certain types of quasiparticle transport across the cut, thereby, lowering the total entanglement between the two regions.
The same bulk two-dimensional topological phase can have multiple distinct, fully-chiral edge phases. We show that this can occur in the integer quantum Hall states at $ u=8$ and 12, with experimentally-testable consequences. We show that this can occur in Abelian fractional quantum Hall states as well, with the simplest examples being at $ u=8/7, 12/11, 8/15, 16/5$. We give a general criterion for the existence of multiple distinct chiral edge phases for the same bulk phase and discuss experimental consequences. Edge phases correspond to lattices while bulk phases correspond to genera of lattices. Since there are typically multiple lattices in a genus, the bulk-edge correspondence is typically one-to-many; there are usually many stable fully chiral edge phases corresponding to the same bulk. We explain these correspondences using the theory of integral quadratic forms. We show that fermionic systems can have edge phases with only bosonic low-energy excitations and discuss a fermionic generalization of the relation between bulk topological spins and the central charge. The latter follows from our demonstration that every fermionic topological phase can be represented as a bosonic topological phase, together with some number of filled Landau levels. Our analysis shows that every Abelian topological phase can be decomposed into a tensor product of theories associated with prime numbers $p$ in which every quasiparticle has a topological spin that is a $p^n$-th root of unity for some $n$. It also leads to a simple demonstration that all Abelian topological phases can be represented by $U(1)^N$ Chern-Simons theory parameterized by a K-matrix.
We study the entanglement entropy between (possibly distinct) topological phases across an interface using an Abelian Chern-Simons description with topological boundary conditions (TBCs) at the interface. From a microscopic point of view, these TBCs correspond to turning on particular gapping interactions between the edge modes across the interface. However, in studying entanglement in the continuum Chern-Simons description, we must confront the problem of non-factorization of the Hilbert space, which is a standard property of gauge theories. We carefully define the entanglement entropy by using an extended Hilbert space construction directly in the continuum theory. We show how a given TBC isolates a corresponding gauge invariant state in the extended Hilbert space, and hence compute the resulting entanglement entropy. We find that the sub-leading correction to the area law remains universal, but depends on the choice of topological boundary conditions. This agrees with the microscopic calculation of cite{Cano:2014pya}. Additionally, we provide a replica path integral calculation for the entropy. In the case when the topological phases across the interface are taken to be identical, our construction gives a novel explanation of the equivalence between the left-right entanglement of (1+1)d Ishibashi states and the spatial entanglement of (2+1)d topological phases.
We compute the topological entanglement entropy for a large set of lattice models in $d$-dimensions. It is well known that many such quantum systems can be constructed out of lattice gauge models. For dimensionality higher than two, there are generalizations going beyond gauge theories, which are called higher gauge theories and rely on higher-order generalizations of groups. Our main concern is a large class of $d$-dimensional quantum systems derived from Abelian higher gauge theories. In this paper, we derive a general formula for the bipartition entanglement entropy for this class of models, and from it we extract both the area law and the sub-leading terms, which explicitly depend on the topology of the entangling surface. We show that the entanglement entropy $S_A$ in a sub-region $A$ is proportional to $log(GSD_{tilde{A}})$, where (GSD_{tilde{A}}) is the ground state degeneracy of a particular restriction of the full model to (A). The quantity $GSD_{tilde{A}}$ can be further divided into a contribution that scales with the size of the boundary $partial A$ and a term which depends on the topology of $partial A$. There is also a topological contribution coming from $A$ itself, that may be non-zero when $A$ has a non-trivial homology. We present some examples and discuss how the topology of $A$ affects the topological entropy. Our formalism allows us to do most of the calculation for arbitrary dimension $d$. The result is in agreement with entanglement calculations for known topological models.
We analyze the possible existence of topological phases in two-legged spin ladders considering a staggered interaction in both chains. When the staggered interaction in one chain is shifted by one site with respect to the other chain, the model can be mapped, in the continuum limit, into a non linear sigma model NL$sigma$M plus a topological term which is nonvanishing when the number of legs is two. This implies the existence of a critical point which distinguishes two phases. We perform a numerical analysis of energy levels, parity and string non-local order parameters, correlation functions between $x,y,z$ components of spins at the edges of an open ladder, the degeneracy of the entanglement spectrum and the entanglement entropy in order to characterize these two different phases. Finally, we identify one phase with a Mott insulator and the other one with a Haldane insulator.
Topological qauntum field theory(TQFT) is a very powerful theoretical tool to study topological phases and phase transitions. In $2+1$D, it is well known that the Chern-Simons theory captures all the universal topological data of topological phases, e.g., quasi-particle braiding statistics, chiral central charge and even provides us a deep insight for the nature of topological phase transitions. Recently, topological phases of quantum matter are also intensively studied in $3+1$D and it has been shown that loop like excitation obeys the so-called three-loop-braiding statistics. In this paper, we will try to establish a TQFT framework to understand the quantum statistics of particle and loop like excitation in $3+1$D. We will focus on Abelian topological phases for simplicity, however, the general framework developed here is not limited to Abelian topological phases.