We show that the Davies generator associated to any 2D Kitaevs quantum double model has a non-vanishing spectral gap in the thermodynamic limit. This validates rigorously the extended belief that those models are useless as self-correcting quantum memories, even in the non-abelian case. The proof uses recent ideas and results regarding the characterization of the spectral gap for parent Hamiltonians associated to Projected Entangled Pair States in terms of a bulk-boundary correspondence.
The thermalization process of the 2D Kitaev model is studied within the Markovian weak coupling approximation. It is shown that its largest relaxation time is bounded from above by a constant independent of the system size and proportional to $exp(2Delta/kT)$ where $Delta$ is an energy gap over the 4-fold degenerate ground state. This means that the 2D Kitaev model is not an example of a memory, neither quantum nor classical.
The computation of the ground state (i.e. the eigenvector related to the smallest eigenvalue) is an important task in the simulation of quantum many-body systems. As the dimension of the underlying vector space grows exponentially in the number of particles, one has to consider appropriate subsets promising both convenient approximation properties and efficient computations. The variational ansatz for this numerical approach leads to the minimization of the Rayleigh quotient. The Alternating Least Squares technique is then applied to break down the eigenvector computation to problems of appropriate size, which can be solved by classical methods. Efficient computations require fast computation of the matrix-vector product and of the inner product of two decomposed vectors. To this end, both appropriate representations of vectors and efficient contraction schemes are needed. Here approaches from many-body quantum physics for one-dimensional and two-dimensional systems (Matrix Product States and Projected Entangled Pair States) are treated mathematically in terms of tensors. We give the definition of these concepts, bring some results concerning uniqueness and numerical stability and show how computations can be executed efficiently within these concepts. Based on this overview we present some modifications and generalizations of these concepts and show that they still allow efficient computations such as applicable contraction schemes. In this context we consider the minimization of the Rayleigh quotient in terms of the {sc parafac} (CP) formalism, where we also allow different tensor partitions. This approach makes use of efficient contraction schemes for the calculation of inner products in a way that can easily be extended to the mps format but also to higher dimensional problems.
The purpose of this review article is to present some of the latest developments using random techniques, and in particular, random matrix techniques in quantum information theory. Our review is a blend of a rather exhaustive review, combined with more detailed examples -- coming from research projects in which the authors were involved. We focus on two main topics, random quantum states and random quantum channels. We present results related to entropic quantities, entanglement of typical states, entanglement thresholds, the output set of quantum channels, and violations of the minimum output entropy of random channels.
Kitaevs quantum double models in 2D provide some of the most commonly studied examples of topological quantum order. In particular, the ground space is thought to yield a quantum error-correcting code. We offer an explicit proof that this is the case for arbitrary finite groups. Actually a stronger claim is shown: any two states with zero energy density in some contractible region must have the same reduced state in that region. Alternatively, the local properties of a gauge-invariant state are fully determined by specifying that its holonomies in the region are trivial. We contrast this result with the fact that local properties of gauge-invariant states are not generally determined by specifying all of their non-Abelian fluxes -- that is, the Wilson loops of lattice gauge theory do not form a complete commuting set of observables. We also note that the methods developed by P. Naaijkens (PhD thesis, 2012) under a different context can be adapted to provide another proof of the error correcting property of Kitaevs model. Finally, we compute the topological entanglement entropy in Kitaevs model, and show, contrary to previous claims in the literature, that it does not depend on whether the log dim R term is included in the definition of entanglement entropy.
Tensor network states provide successful descriptions of strongly correlated quantum systems with applications ranging from condensed matter physics to cosmology. Any family of tensor network states possesses an underlying entanglement structure given by a graph of maximally entangled states along the edges that identify the indices of the tensors to be contracted. Recently, more general tensor networks have been considered, where the maximally entangled states on edges are replaced by multipartite entangled states on plaquettes. Both the structure of the underlying graph and the dimensionality of the entangled states influence the computational cost of contracting these networks. Using the geometrical properties of entangled states, we provide a method to construct tensor network representations with smaller effective bond dimension. We illustrate our method with the resonating valence bond state on the kagome lattice.