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arXiv:1305.1949 · Physical Review Letters

Bulk Entanglement Spectrum Reveals Quantum Criticality within a Topological State

Timothy H. Hsieh, Liang Fu

Published Sep 4, 2014• 48 citations
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Abstract

A quantum phase transition is usually achieved by tuning physical parameters in a Hamiltonian at zero temperature. Here, we show that the ground state of a topological phase itself encodes critical properties of its transition to a trivial phase. To extract this information, we introduce an extensive partition of the system into two subsystems both of which extend throughout the bulk in all directions. The resulting bulk entanglement spectrum has a low-lying part that resembles the excitation spectrum of a bulk Hamiltonian, which allows us to probe a topological phase transition from a single wave function by tuning either the geometry of the partition or the entanglement temperature. As an example, this remarkable correspondence between the topological phase transition and the entanglement criticality is rigorously established for integer quantum Hall states.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.113.106801

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A quantum phase transition is usually achieved by tuning physical parameters in a Hamiltonian at zero temperature. Here, we show that the ground state of a topological phase itself encodes critical properties of its transition to a trivial phase. To extract this information, we introduce an extensive partition of the system into two subsystems both of which extend throughout the bulk in all directions. The resulting bulk entanglement spectrum has a low-lying part that resembles the excitation spectrum of a bulk Hamiltonian, which allows us to probe a topological phase transition from a single wave function by tuning either the geometry of the partition or the entanglement temperature. As an example, this remarkable correspondence between the topological phase transition and the entanglement criticality is rigorously established for integer quantum Hall states.
The critical theories for the topological phase transitions of integer quantum Hall states to a trivial insulating state with the same symmetry can be obtained by calculating the ground state entanglement spectrum under a symmetric checkerboard bipartition. In contrast to the gapless edge excitations under the left-right bipartition, a quantum network with bulk gapless excitations naturally emerges without fine tuning. On a large finite lattice, the resulting critical theory for the $\ensuremath{\nu}=1$ state is the (2 + 1)-dimensional relativistic quantum field theory characterized by a single Dirac cone spectrum and a pair of fractionalized zero-energy states, while for the $\ensuremath{\nu}=2$ state the critical theory exhibits a parabolic spectrum and no sign of fractionalization in the zero-energy states. A triangular correspondence is established among the bulk topological theory, gapless edge theory, and the critical theory via the ground state entanglement spectrum.
We substantiate a complete picture of the ``bulk-edge correspondence'' conjecture for topological phases. By studying the eigenstates in the entanglement spectrum for both the ideal and realistic Coulomb ground states of the fractional quantum Hall system, it is verified that the eigenstates in the universal part of the entanglement spectrum purely lie in the Hilbert space of the edge excitations projected onto the physical Hilbert space of the subsystem itself. Hence, not only are the eigenlevels in the entanglement spectrum in one-to-one correspondence with the eigenenergies of an effective dynamical edge Hamiltonian, but all the eigenstates are confirmed to be the actual (projected) edge excitations of the subsystem. This result also reveals the possibility of extracting the full information of the edge excitations from the state of the subsystem reduced from a geometric cut of the pure ground state of the total system in topological phases.
Abstract Entanglement spectroscopy has stimulated an extensive range of studies. The entanglement spectrum is the spectrum of the reduced density matrix when the system is partitioned into two. For many quantum systems, when computed from the bulk ground-state wavefunction, it gives access to the physics of edge excitations. It is thus a valuable tool to diagnose topological ordering. These lecture notes provide an overview of entanglement spectroscopy, mostly in the context of the fractional quantum Hall effect. The basic concepts are introduced through the example of quantum spin chains. The connection with entanglement entropy and the matrix product state representation is discussed. The entanglement spectrum can be computed for non-interacting topological phases, revealing edge excitation from the ground state. Application to fractional quantum Hall phases shows how much information is encoded within the ground state and how different partitions probe different types of excitations. Application to fractional Chern insulators is discussed.
We extend the concept of an entanglement spectrum from the geometrical to the particle bipartite partition. We apply this to several fractional quantum Hall wave functions on both sphere and torus geometries to show that this new type of entanglement spectra completely reveals the physics of bulk quasihole excitations. While this is easily understood when a local Hamiltonian for the model state exists, we show that the quasihole wave functions are encoded within the model state even when such a Hamiltonian is not known. As a nontrivial example, we look at Jain's composite fermion states and obtain their quasiholes directly from the model state wave function. We reach similar conclusions for wave functions described by Jack polynomials.
Under an appropriate symmetric bulk bipartition in a one-dimensional symmetry protected topological phase with the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki matrix product state wave function for the odd integer spin chains, a bulk critical entanglement spectrum can be obtained, describing the excitation spectrum of the critical point separating the topological phase from the trivial state with the same symmetry. Such a critical point is beyond the standard Landau-Ginzburg-Wilson paradigm for symmetry-breaking phase transitions. Recently, the framework of matrix product states for topological phases with Majorana fermions/parafermions has been established. Here we first generalize these fixed-point matrix product states with the zero correlation length to the more generic ground-state wave functions with a finite correlation length for the general one-dimensional interacting Majorana fermion/parafermion systems. Then we employ the previous method to decode quantum criticality to the interacting Majorana fermion/parafermion matrix product states. The obtained quantum critical spectra are described by the conformal field theories with central charge $c\ensuremath{\le}1$, characterizing the quantum critical theories separating the fermionic/parafermionic topological phase from the trivial phases with the same symmetry.
Many topologically nontrivial states of matter possess gapless degrees of freedom on the boundary, and when these boundary states delocalize into the bulk, a phase transition occurs, and the system becomes topologically trivial. We show that tensor networks provide a natural framework for analyzing such topological phase transitions in terms of the boundary degrees of freedom which mediate it. To do so, we make use of a correspondence between a topologically nontrivial ground state and its phase transition to a trivial phase established in T. Hsieh and L. Fu (arXiv:1305.1949). This involved computing the bulk entanglement spectrum (BES) of the ground state upon tracing out an extensive subsystem. This work implements BES via tensor network representations of ground states. In this framework, the universality class of the quantum critical entanglement Hamiltonian in ddd spatial dimensions is either derived analytically or mapped to a classical statistical model in d+1d+1d+1 dimensions, which can be studied using Monte Carlo or tensor renormalization-group methods. As an example, we analytically derive the universality classes of topological phase transitions from the spin-1 chain Haldane phase and demonstrate that the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) wave function (and its generalizations) remarkably contains critical six-vertex (and, in general, eight-vertex) models within it.