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arXiv:0805.0332 · Physical Review Letters

Entanglement Spectrum as a Generalization of Entanglement Entropy: Identification of Topological Order in Non-Abelian Fractional Quantum Hall Effect States

Hui Li, F. D. M. Haldane

Published Jul 3, 2008• 1,647 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We study the "entanglement spectrum" (a presentation of the Schmidt decomposition analogous to a set of "energy levels") of a many-body state, and compare the Moore-Read model wave function for the nu=5/2 fractional quantum Hall state with a generic 5/2 state obtained by finite-size diagonalization of the second-Landau-level-projected Coulomb interactions. Their spectra share a common "gapless" structure, related to conformal field theory. In the model state, these are the only levels, while in the "generic" case, they are separated from the rest of the spectrum by a clear "entanglement gap", which appears to remain finite in the thermodynamic limit. We propose that the low-lying entanglement spectrum can be used as a "fingerprint" to identify topological order.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.101.010504

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We study the "entanglement spectrum" (a presentation of the Schmidt decomposition analogous to a set of "energy levels") of a many-body state, and compare the Moore-Read model wave function for the nu=5/2 fractional quantum Hall state with a generic 5/2 state obtained by finite-size diagonalization of the second-Landau-level-projected Coulomb interactions. Their spectra share a common "gapless" structure, related to conformal field theory. In the model state, these are the only levels, while in the "generic" case, they are separated from the rest of the spectrum by a clear "entanglement gap", which appears to remain finite in the thermodynamic limit. We propose that the low-lying entanglement spectrum can be used as a "fingerprint" to identify topological order.
Entanglement in topological phases of matter has so far been investigated through the perspective of their ground-state wave functions. In contrast, we demonstrate that the excitations of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) systems also contain information to identify the system's topological order. Entanglement spectrum of the FQH quasihole (QH) excitations is shown to differentiate between the conformal field theory (CFT) sectors, based on the relative position of the QH with respect to the entanglement cut. For Read-Rezayi model states, as well as Coulomb interaction eigenstates, the counting of the QH entanglement levels in the thermodynamic limit matches exactly the CFT counting, and sector changes occur as non-Abelian quasiholes successively cross the entanglement cut.
We give a complete definition of the entanglement gap separating low-energy, topological levels from high-energy, generic ones, in the "entanglement spectrum" of fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states. This is accomplished by removing the magnetic length inherent in the FQH problem--a procedure which we call taking the conformal limit. The counting of the low-lying entanglement levels starts off as the counting of modes of the edge theory of the FQH state, but quickly develops finite-size effects which we find to serve as a fingerprint of the FQH state. As the sphere manifold where the FQH resides grows, the level spacing of the states at the same angular momentum goes to zero, suggestive of the presence of relativistic gapless edge states. By using the adiabatic continuity of the low-entanglement energy levels, we investigate whether two states are topologically connected.
The topological entanglement entropy is a robust measurement of the quantum many-body state with topological order. In fractional quantum Hall (FQH) state, it has a connection to the quantum dimension of the state itself and its quasihole excitations from the conformal field theory (CFT) description. We systematically study the entanglement entropy in the Laughlin, Moore-Read, and Read-Rezayi FQH states. The Abelian nature of the quasihole manifests in the invariant of the entanglement entropy and spectrum while it is created in the subsystem. Whereas the non-Abelian quasihole excitation induces an extra correction of the topological entanglement entropy and the changing of the structure of the entanglement spectrum. The quantum dimension of the quasihole can be obtained from the entropy difference before and after inserting the quasihole. On the other hand, the entanglement entropy behaviors similarly to the density profile and has less oscillations far away from the center of quasihole. It gives us a better definition of the quasihole boundary and the measurement of the size of the quasihole.
The entanglement spectra of fractional quantum Hall states contain universal fingerprints of their underlying topological order, as posited by the Li-Haldane conjecture. In this work, we uncover a finer universal structure within the entanglement spectra unravelled by projective measurements. Concretely, we study the projected ensemble of fractional quantum Hall states, defined as the collection of quantum states on a subsystem conditioned on measurement outcomes of its complement. We find that this ensemble exhibits a hidden hierarchy inside the Li-Haldane edge manifold: by conditioning on measurement outcomes, the entanglement spectrum's support is split into measurement-dependent sectors whose ranks we demonstrate are fixed by conformal field theory counting, an observation we dub the measurement-resolved Li-Haldane conjecture. For the non-Abelian Moore-Read state, this hierarchy is particularly rich: each parity-resolved edge manifold contains internal subspaces whose dimensions reproduce the conformal field theory counting of the opposite-parity sector. This structure persists even in realistic Coulomb-interacting ground states, establishing the projected ensemble as a sharp new probe of topological order beyond what the entanglement spectrum alone can detect.
Using the newly developed matrix product state formalism for non-Abelian fractional quantum Hall (FQH) states, we address the question of whether a FQH trial wave function written as a correlation function in a nonunitary conformal field theory (CFT) can describe the bulk of a gapped FQH phase. We show that the nonunitary Gaffnian state exhibits clear signatures of a pathological behavior. As a benchmark we compute the correlation length of a Moore-Read state and find it to be finite in the thermodynamic limit. By contrast, the Gaffnian state has an infinite correlation length in (at least) the non-Abelian sector, and is therefore gapless. We also compute the topological entanglement entropy of several non-Abelian states with and without quasiholes. For the first time in the FQH effect the results are in excellent agreement in all topological sectors with the CFT prediction for unitary states. For the nonunitary Gaffnian state in finite size systems, the topological entanglement entropy seems to behave like that of the composite fermion Jain state at equal filling.
The Moore-Read Pfaffian and anti-Pfaffian states have been under scrupulous review as candidates which describe the fractional quantum Hall effect at filling factor 5/2. Quantum states in the universality class of the Moore-Read Pfaffian/anti-Pfaffian have non-trivial intrinsic topological order and support low-energy non-Abelian excitations that have applications in fault-tolerant topological quantum computing schemes. Both states are exact ground states of three-body Hamiltonians that explicitly break particle-hole symmetry. We study the topological order of a competing ansatz state &PSgr;2 that is the exact ground state of a two-body Hamiltonian that preserves particle-hole symmetry. In particular, we calculate the bipartite entanglement entropy and spectra in the lowest Landau level in the spherical geometry for &PSgr; 2. We perform such calculations for a finite number of electrons up to 14. We then extrapolate to the thermodynamic limit the topological entanglement entropy γ as a measure of the topological order of the ansatz and compare to the known value of the Moore-Read Pfaffian/anti-Pfaffian state. We also study the orbital entanglement spectra for &PSgr;2 and compare with the Moore-Read Pfaffian and two-body Coulomb ground states. We show that our extrapolation of γ lies within the uncertainty of the known value of γ for the Moore-Read Pfaffian state, and that the orbital entanglement spectra of &PSgr;2 assumes a similar structure to that of the two-body Coulomb interaction.