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Register a new userDynamical signatures of symmetry protected topology following symmetry breaking
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We investigate topological signatures in the short-time non-equilibrium dynamics of symmetry protected topological (SPT) systems starting from initial states which break the protecting symmetry. Naively, one might expect that topology loses meaning when a protecting symmetry is broken. Defying this intuition, we illustrate, in an interacting Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, how this combination of symmetry breaking and quench dynamics can give rise to both single-particle and many-body signatures of topology. From the dynamics of the symmetry broken state, we find that we are able to dynamically probe the equilibrium topological phase diagram of a symmetry respecting projection of the post-quench Hamiltonian. In the ensemble dynamics, we demonstrate how spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of the protecting symmetry can result in a quantized many-body topological `invariant which is not pinned under unitary time evolution. We dub this `dynamical many-body topology (DMBT). We show numerically that both the pure state and ensemble signatures are remarkably robust, and argue that these non-equilibrium signatures should be quite generic in SPT systems, regardless of protecting symmetries or spatial dimension.
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We show that the metastable, symmetry-breaking ground states of quantum many-body Hamiltonians have vanishing quantum mutual information between macroscopically separated regions, and are thus the most classical ones among all possible quantum ground states. This statement is obvious only when the symmetry-breaking ground states are simple product states, e.g. at the factorization point. On the other hand, symmetry-breaking states are in general entangled along the entire ordered phase, and to show that they actually feature the least macroscopic correlations compared to their symmetric superpositions is highly non trivial. We prove this result in general, by considering the quantum mutual information based on the $2-$Renyi entanglement entropy and using a locality result stemming from quasi-adiabatic continuation. Moreover, in the paradigmatic case of the exactly solvable one-dimensional quantum $XY$ model, we further verify the general result by considering also the quantum mutual information based on the von Neumann entanglement entropy.
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