This thesis reviews the multiscale entanglement renormalisation ansatz or MERA, a numerical tool for the study of quantum many-body systems and a discrete realisation of the AdS/CFT duality. The thesis covers an introduction to the necessary background concepts of entanglement, entanglement entropy and tensor network states, the structure and main features of MERA and its applications in condensed matter theory and holography. Also covered are details on the algorithmic implementation of MERA and some of its generalisations and extensions. MERA belongs to a class of variational ansatze for quantum many-body states known as tensor network states. It is especially well-suited for the study of scale invariant critical points. MERA is based on a real-space renormalisation group procedure called entanglement renormalisation, designed to systematically handle entanglement at different length scales along the coarse-graining flow. Entanglement renormalisation has be used for example to efficiently describe Kitaev states of the toric code, the prime example of topological order, and numerically study the ground state of the highly frustrated spin-1/2 Heisenberg model on a kagome lattice and various other one- and two-dimensional lattice models. The geometric and causal structure of MERA, which underlies its effectiveness as a numerical tool, also makes it a discrete version of the AdS/CFT duality. This duality describes a conformal field theory by a gravity theory in a higher dimensional space, and vice versa. The duality is manifest in the scaling of entanglement entropy in MERA, which is governed by a law highly analogous to the Ryu-Takayanagi formula for holographic entanglement entropy, in the connection between thermal states and a black-hole-like MERA and in the connection between correlation functions and holographic geodesics in a scale invariant MERA. The aim of this thesis is to lead the reader to an understanding of what MERA is, how it works and how it can be used. MERA's core features and uses are presented in a comprehensive and explicit way, and a broad view of possible applications and further directions is given. Plenty of references are also offered to direct the reader to further research on how MERA may relate to his/her interests.
Entanglement renormalization is a real-space renormalization group (RG) transformation for quantum many-body systems. It generates the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), a tensor network capable of efficiently describing a large class of many-body ground states, including those of systems at a quantum critical point or with topological order. The MERA has also been proposed to be a discrete realization of the holographic principle of string theory. Here we propose the use of symmetric tensors as a mechanism to build a symmetry-protected RG flow, and discuss two important applications of this construction. First, we argue that symmetry-protected entanglement renormalization produces the proper structure of RG fixed points, namely, a fixed-point for each symmetry-protected phase. Second, in the context of holography, we show that by using symmetric tensors, a global symmetry at the boundary becomes a local symmetry in the bulk, thus explicitly realizing in the MERA a characteristic feature of the AdS/CFT correspondence.
The holographic duality relates a field theory to a theory of (quantum) gravity in one dimension more. The extra dimension represents the scale of the RG transformation in the field theory. It has been conjectured that the tensor networks which arise during the real space renormalization procedure like the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) are a discretized version of the background of the gravity theory. We strive to contribute to make this conjecture testable by considering an explicit and tractable example, namely the dual network of the toric code, for which MERA can be performed analytically. We examine how this construction can be extended to include excited states. Furthermore, we show how to calculate topological entanglement entropy from the geometry of MERA. This method is expected to generalize to systems with generic entanglement structure.
As a quantum-informative window into quantum many-body physics, the concept and application of the entanglement renormalization group (ERG) have been playing a vital role in the study of novel quantum phases of matter, especially long-range entangled (LRE) states in topologically ordered systems. For instance, by recursively applying local unitaries as well as adding and removing qubits that form product states, the 2D toric code ground states, i.e., the fixed point of
Z2 topological order, are efficiently coarse-grained with respect to the system size. As a further improvement, the addition and removal of 2D toric codes in the ground states of the 3D X-cube model is shown to be indispensable and, remarkably, leads to well-defined fixed points of a large class of fracton orders that are non-liquid-like. Here, we present a substantially unified ERG framework in which general degrees of freedom are allowed to be recursively added or removed. Specifically, we establish an exotic hierarchy of ERG and LRE states in Pauli stabilizer codes, where the 2D toric code and 3D X-cube models are naturally included. In the hierarchy, LRE states like 3D X-cube and 3D toric code ground states can be added or removed in ERG processes of more complex LRE states. In this way, a large group of Pauli stabilizer codes are categorized into a series of state towers; within each tower, in addition to local unitaries including cnot (controlled-NOT) gates, lower LRE states of level-
n are added or removed in the level-
n ERG process of an upper LRE state of level
(n+1), connecting LRE states of different levels and unveiling complex relations among LRE states. As future directions, we expect this hierarchy can be applied to more general LRE states, leading to a unified ERG scenario of LRE states and exact tensor-network representations in the form of more generalized branching multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz.
Computational complexity reduction is at the basis of a new formulation of many-body quantum states according to tensor network ansatz, originally framed in one-dimensional lattices. In order to include long-range entanglement characterizing phase transitions, the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) defines a sequence of coarse-grained lattices, obtained by targeting the map of a scale-invariant system into an identical coarse-grained one. The quantum circuit associated with this hierarchical structure includes the definition of causal relations and unitary extensions, leading to the definition of ground subspaces as stabilizer codes. The emerging error correcting codes are referred to logical indices located at the highest hierarchical level and to physical indices yielded by redundancy, framed in the AdS-CFT correspondence as holographic quantum codes with bulk and boundary indices, respectively. In a use-case scenario based on errors consisting of spin erasure, the correction is implemented as the reconstruction of a bulk local operator.
We show how to build a multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) representation of the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian H by applying the recently proposed tensor network renormalization [G. Evenbly and G. Vidal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 180405 (2015)] to the Euclidean time evolution operator e(-βH) for infinite β. This approach bypasses the costly energy minimization of previous MERA algorithms and, when applied to finite inverse temperature β, produces a MERA representation of a thermal Gibbs state. Our construction endows tensor network renormalization with a renormalization group flow in the space of wave functions and Hamiltonians (and not merely in the more abstract space of tensors) and extends the MERA formalism to classical statistical systems.