Entanglement measures find frequent application in the study of topologically ordered systems, where the presence of topological order is reflected in an additional contribution to the entanglement of the system. Obtaining this topological entropy from analytical calculations or numerical simulations is generally difficult due to the fact that it is an order-one correction to leading terms that scale with the size of the system. In order to distill the topological entropy, one resorts to extrapolation as a function of system size or to clever subtraction schemes that allow one to cancel out the leading terms. Both approaches have the disadvantage of requiring multiple (accurate) calculations of the entanglement of the system. Here we propose a modification of conventional entanglement calculations that allows one to obtain the topological entropy of a system from a single measurement of entanglement. In our approach, we replace the conventional trace over the degrees of freedom of a partition of the system with a projection onto a given state (which need not be known). We show that a proper choice of partition and projective measurement allows one to rid the entanglement measures of the typical boundary terms, thus exposing the topological contribution alone. We consider specifically the measures known as von Neumann entropy and entanglement negativity and we discuss their application to both models that exhibit quantum as well as classical topological order.
Entanglement measures find frequent application in the study of topologically ordered systems, where the presence of topological order is reflected in an additional contribution to the entanglement of the system. Obtaining this topological entropy from analytical calculations or numerical simulations is generally difficult due to the fact that it is an order-one correction to leading terms that scale with the size of the system. In order to distill the topological entropy, one resorts to extrapolation as a function of system size or to clever subtraction schemes that allow one to cancel out the leading terms. Both approaches have the disadvantage of requiring multiple (accurate) calculations of the entanglement of the system. Here we propose a modification of conventional entanglement calculations that allows one to obtain the topological entropy of a system from a single measurement of entanglement. In our approach, we replace the conventional trace over the degrees of freedom of a partition of the system with a projection onto a given state (which need not be known). We show that a proper choice of partition and projective measurement allows one to rid the entanglement measures of the typical boundary terms, thus exposing the topological contribution alone. We consider specifically the measures known as von Neumann entropy and entanglement negativity and we discuss their application to both models that exhibit quantum as well as classical topological order.
Topological entanglement entropy (TEE) provides a universal measure of long-range quantum correlations in topologically ordered systems, offering critical insights into exotic phases of matter. While theoretical frameworks, including exactly solvable lattice models, tensor networks, and field-theoretic approaches, enable precise computation of TEE in idealized settings, practical implementation faces multiple challenges. Finite-size and geometry effects, including boundary corners and lattice discretization, introduce significant corrections that can obscure the small topological contribution. Gapless edges in chiral topological phases further complicate the isolation of bulk entanglement, requiring careful separation of edge and bulk contributions. Symmetry-protected and symmetry-enriched phases necessitate additional diagnostics, such as symmetry-resolved entanglement and entanglement negativity, to fully characterize topological properties. Experimental measurement remains challenging, with current approaches limited to small systems using Rényi entropies via swap operations and interferometric methods. This work synthesizes these practical considerations, outlines mitigation strategies, and highlights ongoing directions for bridging theoretical, numerical, and experimental approaches to robustly quantify TEE. Understanding these limitations is essential for accurate characterization of topological order and for guiding the development of quantum technologies leveraging topological protection.
We use the entanglement negativity, a measure of entanglement for mixed states, to probe the structure of entanglement in the ground state of a topologically ordered system. Through analytical calculations of the negativity in the ground state(s) of the toric code model, we explicitly show that the pure-state entanglement of a region A and its complement B is the sum of two types of contributions: boundary entanglement and long-range entanglement. Boundary entanglement is seen to be insensitive to tracing out the degrees of freedom in the interior of regions A and B, and therefore it entangles only degrees of freedom in A and B that are close to their common boundary. We recover the well-known result that boundary entanglement is proportional to the size of each boundary separating A and B and it includes an additive, universal correction. The second, long-range, contribution to pure-state entanglement appears only when A and B are noncontractible regions (e.g., on a torus) and it is seen to be destroyed when tracing out a noncontractible region in the interior of A or B. In the toric code, only the long-range contribution to the entanglement depends on the specific ground state under consideration.
The interplay of the constituents of interacting many-body systems may reveal emergent properties on the macroscopic scale which are not inherent to the individual constituents. These properties are expressed in macroscopic observables \ndescribing the state — denoted as the phase of the system. Continuous phase transition between phases are generically manifested in critical behavior, for example, a divergence of a macroscopic observable. The identification of the present phase of a system and the classification of critical phenomena into universality classes are exciting challenges of condensed-matter physics. \nIn this thesis, we use entanglement entropies as macroscopic quantities for the characterization of phases of quantum matter and critical theories. For groundstates of quantum many-body systems the entanglement entropy is a measure of \nthe amount of entanglement between two subsystems. The generic dependence of the entanglement entropy on the size and shape of the subsystems is contained in the well-known boundary law — stating a scaling of the entanglement entropy with the boundary between the two subsystems. We numerically investigate how the coefficient of this dependence reflects quantum phase transitions in simple spin-half bilayer models. \nSubleading terms to the boundary law such as a logarithmic contribution provide universal numbers for the criticality of field theories. We examine free and interacting theories from an entanglement entropy perspective in order to assess the role of the coefficient of the logarithmic correction induced by corners in the subsystems. Beyond its universality, this coefficient also quantifies degrees of freedom of low-lying excitations in the conformal field theory describing a critical point. \nA constant contribution to the boundary law indicates the presence of so-called topological order in the ground state of a many-body system. This extremely useful property can also be identified in classical counterparts of entanglement entropy which we study at the example of various toric code models. To this endeavor, we have designed Monte Carlo techniques which allow for an efficient numerical computation of the constant contribution. In particular, we analyze via entanglement entropies under which conditions remnants of topological order are present in the quantum system at finite temperature and at perturbations from a magnetic field. The major motivation behind this effort is to use topological order for the robust storage of a quantum information — a basic need for the construction of quantum \ncomputers.
Here we investigate the connection between topological order and the geometric entanglement, as measured by the logarithm of the overlap between a given state and its closest product state of blocks. We do this for a variety of topologically ordered systems such as the toric code, double semion, colour code and quantum double models. As happens for the entanglement entropy, we find that for sufficiently large block sizes the geometric entanglement is, up to possible sub-leading corrections, the sum of two contributions: a bulk contribution obeying a boundary law times the number of blocks and a contribution quantifying the underlying pattern of long-range entanglement of the topologically ordered state. This topological contribution is also present in the case of single-spin blocks in most cases, and constitutes an alternative characterization of topological order for these quantum states based on a multipartite entanglement measure. In particular, we see that the topological term for the two-dimensional colour code is twice as much as the one for the toric code, in accordance with recent renormalization group arguments (Bombin et al 2012 New J. Phys. 14 073048). Motivated by these results, we also derive a general formalism to obtain upper- and lower-bounds to the geometric entanglement of states with a non-Abelian group symmetry, and which we explicitly use to analyse quantum double models. Furthermore, we also provide an analysis of the robustness of the topological contribution in terms of renormalization and perturbation theory arguments, as well as a numerical estimation for small systems. Some of the results in this paper rely on the ability to disentangle single sites from the quantum state, which is always possible for the systems that we consider. Additionally we relate our results to the behaviour of the relative entropy of entanglement in topologically ordered systems, and discuss a number of numerical approaches based on tensor networks that could be employed to extract this topological contribution for large systems beyond exactly solvable models.
A characterization of topological order in terms of bi-partite entanglement was proposed recently [A. Kitaev and J. Preskill, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 110404 (2006); M. Levin and X.-G. Wen, ibid. 96, 110405 (2006)]. It was argued that in a topological phase there is a universal additive constant in the entanglement entropy, called the topological entanglement entropy, which reflects the underlying gauge theory for the topological order. In the present paper, we evaluate numerically the topological entanglement entropy in the ground states of a quantum dimer model on the triangular lattice, which is known to have a dimer liquid phase with Z2 topological order. We examine the two original constructions to measure the topological entropy by combining entropies on plural areas, and we observe that in the large-area limit they both approach the value expected for Z2 topological order. We also consider the entanglement entropy on a topologically nontrivial ``zigzag'' area and propose to use it as another way to measure the topological entropy.
Abstract If we partition a Hilbert space we can define the entanglement entropy (both von Neumann and Renyi) between the two pieces. We consider breaking up a system into two or more distinct spatial regions and ask about the entanglement between these two regions. Studying the toric code ground state as an initial example, we show that there is an entanglement that scales as the length of the cut between the two regions, but there is also a sub-leading term, known as the topological entanglement entropy, which depends only on the topological properties of the system. While the leading term is nonuniversal, the topological term is robust and can be generalized to any other TQFT. We give three different derivations of the topological entanglement entropy.