We analyze the Bures metric over the manifold of thermal density matrices for systems featuring a zero temperature quantum phase transition. We show that the quantum critical region can be characterized in terms of the temperature scaling behavior of the metric tensor itself. Furthermore, the analysis of the metric tensor when both temperature and an external field are varied, allows one to complement the understanding of the phase diagram including crossover regions which are not characterized by any singular behavior. These results provide a further extension of the scope of the metric approach to quantum criticality.
We study finite-temperature topological properties of the Kitaev's spin-honeycomb model in the vortex-free sector with the use of the recently introduced mean Uhlmann curvature. We employ an appropriate fermionization procedure to study the system as a two-band
p-wave superconductor described by a Bogoliubov--de Gennes Hamiltonian. This allows us to study relevant quantities such as Berry and mean Uhlmann curvatures in a simple setting. More specifically, we consider the spin honeycomb in the presence of an external magnetic field breaking time-reversal symmetry. The introduction of such an external perturbation opens up a gap in the phase of the system characterized by non-Abelian statistics. The resulting model belongs to a symmetry-protected class, so that the Uhlmann number can be analyzed. We first consider the Berry curvature on a particular evolution line over the phase diagram. The mean Uhlmann curvature and the Uhlmann number are then analyzed by assuming a thermal state. The mean Uhlmann curvature describes a crossover effect as temperature rises. In the trivial phase, a nonmonotonic dependence of the Uhlmann number, as temperature increases, is reported and explained.
We explore the finite-temperature phase diagram of the anisotropic
XY spin chain using the quantum Chernoff bound metric on thermal states. The analysis of the metric elements allows one to easily identify, in terms of different scaling with temperature, quasiclassical and quantum-critical regions. These results extend recent ones obtained using the Bures metric and show that different information-theoretic notions of distance can carry the same sophisticated information about the phase diagram of an interacting many-body system featuring quantum-critical points.
The Kitaev honeycomb model with a topological phase transition at zero temperature is studied using the quantum-information method. Based on the exact solution of the ground state, the mutual information between two nearest sites and between two bonds with the greatest distance are obtained. It is found that the mutual information shows some singularities at the critical point where the system transits from the gapless phase to the gapped phase. Finite-size effects and scaling behavior are also studied. Our results indicate that the mutual information can serve as a good indicator of the topological phase transition. This is because the mutual information is believed to be able to catch some global correlation properties of the system. Meanwhile, this method has the advantages that the phase transition can be determined easily and the order parameters, which are hard to obtain for some topological phase transitions, are not necessarily known.
Topological systems are an exciting frontier of condensed matter physics, as well as having deep relationships to quantum computing. Progress continues to be made both towards building practical quantum computers and experimentally identifying topological features in real materials. However, these attempts have to contend with the messiness of the real world including the effects of finite temperatures. In quantum computing thermal errors are studied through the framework of quantum error correction. This allows a characterisation of how damaging these errors are, and has provided many general results on the limits of how well given quantum codes can endure thermal errors. In the first part of this thesis we study the typical response of one of the best known quantum codes (the two-dimensional toric code) when subjected to thermal noise. This typical behaviour is compared to the limiting bounds and we note differences that arise due to entropic effects. Topological features are typically properties of the ground state of a system. In some cases this means finite temperatures can be damaging, washing out the topological properties with excitations above the ground state. But in other cases it has been shown that topological systems can have their own unique finite temperature behaviours, which can be used to identify them. In the second part of the thesis we study the topological model Kitaev's honeycomb. Fixing certain conserved quantities restricts the model to special sectors, some of which carry topological phases. We begin by investigating an intrinsically finite temperature property of these topological phases, thermal edge currents. At too high temperatures, close to the bulk gap, the topological behaviour of these currents breaks down. However, we show that at lower temperatures they can be identified and shown to have the expected properties such as robustness to perturbations. Following this we investigate the thermal states of the full model. Our approach to this allows us to probe the topological order of the model in a way that has not been done before and we identify a number of interesting new features of the finite temperature physics.
We investigate the topological phase transition of Kitaev spin liquid in an external magnetic field by calculating the Berry curvature and the Fubini-Study metric. Employing Jordan-Wigner transformation and effective perturbative theory to transform the Hamiltonian into fermionic quadratic form, the Berry curvature is calculated by choosing the effective magnetic field as the parameter, and we find that the
xy component of the Berry curvature has the same behavior around the critical lines with the phase diagram. Especially, we relate the Berry curvature with the derivative of effective magnetic susceptibility which can be regarded as the signature of topological phase transition. Moreover, we related the second nonlinear susceptibility with the interband Berry connection. Then we analytically calculate the generalized Berry curvature in the mixed state called the mean Uhlmann curvature, which can be related with the spectral function. The curves where the Uhlmann curvature changes temperature with different coupling constants reveal that it will have a peak at
T=0.2K when adjusting
Jx from 0.2 to 0.3 with
Jy=0.25, in which the first-order derivative is discontinuous, revealing the characteristic of thermodynamic phase transition from the
B phase quantum spin liquid state to the magnetic ordered state. Last, we analytically calculate the quantum geometric tensor in the effective magnetic-field space whose imaginary part is the Berry curvature and the real part is the Fubini-Study metric, and we find that the
zz component of the Fubini-Study metric and the phase diagram are highly correlated, which will peak at the cross point of three phases, and then the Fubini-Study metric is extended to the finite temperature, called the Bures metric, which has the same behavior of the Uhlmann curvature at
T=0.2K in
B phase.