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arXiv:1507.04682 · Physical Review B

Rényi entropy perspective on topological order in classical toric code models

Johannes Helmes, Jean-Marie Stéphan, Simon Trebst

Published Sep 24, 2015• 9 citations
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Abstract

Concepts of information theory are increasingly used to characterize collective phenomena in condensed matter systems, such as the use of entanglement entropies to identify emergent topological order in interacting quantum many-body systems. Here, we employ classical variants of these concepts, in particular R\'enyi entropies and their associated mutual information, to identify topological order in classical systems. Like for their quantum counterparts, the presence of topological order can be identified in such classical systems via a universal, subleading contribution to the prevalent volume and boundary laws of the classical R\'enyi entropies. We demonstrate that an additional subleading $O(1)$ contribution generically arises for all R\'enyi entropies ${S}^{(n)}$ with $n\ensuremath{\ge}2$ when driving the system towards a phase transition, e.g., into a conventionally ordered phase. This additional subleading term, which we dub connectivity contribution, tracks back to partial subsystem ordering and is proportional to the number of connected parts in a given bipartition. Notably, the Levin-Wen summation scheme, typically used to extract the topological contribution to the R\'enyi entropies, does not fully eliminate this additional connectivity contribution in this classical context. This indicates that the distillation of topological order from R\'enyi entropies requires an additional level of scrutiny to distinguish topological from nontopological $O(1)$ contributions. This is also the case for quantum systems, for which we discuss which entropies are sensitive to these connectivity contributions. We showcase these findings by extensive numerical simulations of a classical variant of the toric code model, for which we study the stability of topological order in the presence of a magnetic field and at finite temperatures from a R\'enyi entropy perspective.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.92.125144

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Concepts of information theory are increasingly used to characterize collective phenomena in condensed matter systems, such as the use of entanglement entropies to identify emergent topological order in interacting quantum many-body systems. Here, we employ classical variants of these concepts, in particular R'enyi entropies and their associated mutual information, to identify topological order in classical systems. Like for their quantum counterparts, the presence of topological order can be identified in such classical systems via a universal, subleading contribution to the prevalent volume and boundary laws of the classical R'enyi entropies. We demonstrate that an additional subleading O(1)O(1)O(1) contribution generically arises for all R'enyi entropies S(n){S}^{(n)}S(n) with n\ensuremath≥2n\ensuremath{\ge}2n\ensuremath≥2 when driving the system towards a phase transition, e.g., into a conventionally ordered phase. This additional subleading term, which we dub connectivity contribution, tracks back to partial subsystem ordering and is proportional to the number of connected parts in a given bipartition. Notably, the Levin-Wen summation scheme, typically used to extract the topological contribution to the R'enyi entropies, does not fully eliminate this additional connectivity contribution in this classical context. This indicates that the distillation of topological order from R'enyi entropies requires an additional level of scrutiny to distinguish topological from nontopological O(1)O(1)O(1) contributions. This is also the case for quantum systems, for which we discuss which entropies are sensitive to these connectivity contributions. We showcase these findings by extensive numerical simulations of a classical variant of the toric code model, for which we study the stability of topological order in the presence of a magnetic field and at finite temperatures from a R'enyi entropy perspective.
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.
In quantum mechanics, string-net condensed states---a family of prototypical states exhibiting nontrivial topological order---can be classified via their long-range entanglement properties, in particular, topological corrections to the prevalent area law of the entanglement entropy. Here we consider classical analogs of such string-net models whose partition function is given by an equal-weight superposition of classical string-net configurations. Our analysis of the Shannon and Renyi entropies for a bipartition of a given system reveals that the prevalent volume law for these classical entropies is augmented by subleading topological corrections that are intimately linked to the anyonic theories underlying the construction of the classical models. We determine the universal values of these topological corrections for a number of underlying anyonic theories including SU(2)k{}_{k}k​, SU(N)1{(N)}_{1}(N)1​, and SU(N)2{(N)}_{2}(N)2​ theories.
We present an analytical study of the quantum phase transition between the topologically ordered toric-code-model ground state and the disordered spin-polarized state. The phase transition is induced by applying an external magnetic field, and the variation in topological order is detected via two nonlocal quantities: the Wilson loop and the topological R\'enyi entropy of order 2. By exploiting an equivalence with the transverse-field Ising model and considering two different variants of the problem, we investigate the field dependence of these quantities by means of an exact treatment in the exactly solvable variant and complementary perturbation theories around the limits of zero and infinite fields in both variants. We find strong evidence that the phase transition point between topological order and disorder is marked by a discontinuity in the topological R\'enyi entropy and that the two phases around the phase transition point are characterized by its different constant values. Our results therefore indicate that the topological R\'enyi entropy is a proper topological invariant: its allowed values are discrete and can be used to distinguish between different phases of matter.
Here we show 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, for the topological universality class of the toric code model. As happens for the entanglement entropy, we find that for large block sizes the geometric entanglement is, up to possible subleading corrections, the sum of two contributions: a non-universal bulk contribution obeying a boundary law times the number of blocks, and a universal contribution quantifying the underlying pattern of long-range entanglement of a topologically-ordered state.
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.
Abstract We use the topological entanglement entropy (TEE) as an efficient tool to fully characterize the Abelian phase of a Z 2 × Z 2 spin liquid emerging as the ground state of topological color code (TCC), which is a class of stabilizer states on the honeycomb lattice. We provide the fusion rules of the quasiparticle (QP) excitations of the model by introducing single- or two-body operators on physical spins for each fusion process which justify the corresponding fusion outcome. Besides this, we extract the TEE from Renyi entanglement entropy (EE) of the TCC, analytically and numerically by finite size exact diagonalization on the disk shape regions with contractible boundaries. We obtain that the EE has a local contribution, which scales linearly with the boundary length in addition to a topological term, i.e. the TEE, arising from the condensation of closed strings in the ground state. We further investigate the ground state dependence of the TEE on regions with non-contractible boundaries, i.e. by cutting the torus to half cylinders, from which we further identify multiple independent minimum entropy states (MES) of the TCC and then extract the U and S modular matrices of the system, which contain the self and mutual statistics of the anyonic QPs and fully characterize the topological phase of the TCC. Eventually, we show that, in spite of the lack of a local order parameter, TEE and other physical quantities obtained from the ground state wave function such as the entanglement spectrum (ES) and ground state fidelity are sensitive probes to study the robustness of a topological phase. We find that the topological order in the presence of a magnetic field persists until the vicinity of the transition point, where the TEE and fidelity drops to zero and the ES splits severely, signaling breakdown of the topological phase of the TCC.