The boundary of a two-dimensional topological superconductor can be modeled by a conformal field theory. Here we demonstrate the behaviors of this high level description emerging from a microscopic model at finite temperatures. To achieve that, we analyze the low-energy sector of Kitaev's honeycomb lattice model and probe its energy current. We observe that the scaling of the energy current with temperature reveals the central charge of the conformal field theory, which is in agreement with the Chern number of the bulk. Importantly, these currents can discriminate between distinct topological phases at finite temperatures. We assess the resilience of this measurement of the central charge under coupling disorder, bulk dimerization, and defects at the boundary, thus establishing it as a favorable means of experimentally probing topological superconductors.
For a long time, it was believed that the Ginzburg-Landau formalism was able to classify all different types of phase transitions. This view changed with the discovery of the quantum Hall effect and topological insulators. Topological insulators (superconductors) are materials that host symmetry-protected metallic edge states in an insulating (superconducting) bulk. Although topological insulators are well understood by now, a thermodynamic description of their behavior remained elusive, firstly because the edges are lost in the thermodynamic limit, when the system size goes to infinity, and secondly because topological quantum field theories involve non-local order parameters, and hence cannot be captured by the conventional Ginzburg-Landau formalism. Recently, this challenge has been overcome: by using Hill thermodynamics to describe the paradigmatic Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in two dimensions, it has been shown that at the topological phase change the thermodynamic potential does not scale extensively due to the boundary effects.\n\nHere, we extend this thermodynamic approach firstly to the Kitaev chain in one-dimension and then to different topological models in various dimensions (the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model in one dimension, the Kane-Mele model in two dimensions and the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in three dimensions) at zero temperature. Surprisingly, we find that all these models exhibit the same universal behavior in the order of the topological-phase transition, which depends on the dimensionality of the system. Next, we use this thermodynamic approach to describe topological phases at finite-temperatures. We calculate the entropy and heat capacity for the Kitaev chain and verify its behavior in comparison with conformal field theory. Furthermore, we extend the topological phase transition to finite-temperatures, by numerically deriving the topological phase diagram for the bulk of the system, and show that it displays a good agreement with the one calculated analytically from the Uhlmann phase. Finally, we calculate measurable quantities such as the density of states and the heat capacity for different topological insulators. Our work reveals unexpected universalities and opens the path to a thermodynamic description of systems with a non-local order parameter, provided that nonlinear terms are appropriately taken into account for the thermodynamic extensive variables.
We investigate signatures of chirality at Chern insulator transitions in the presence of a boundary. The transition between a trivial insulator and a Chern insulator with Chern number
C=1 is described by a massless Dirac fermion whose parity anomaly gives a critical Hall conductivity
σxy=21he2. Using a Dirac mass domain wall construction, we show that the chiral edge mode delocalizes into the bulk at criticality, but the boundary fermion correlation function retains a chiral structure and acquires the scaling dimension of the bulk fermion. We compute current correlation functions and demonstrate that the anomaly of the bulk Hall response is matched by delocalized chiral modes near the boundary. Using only the residual conformal symmetry of a (2+1)d conformal field theory (CFT) in a half-space, we identify parity-odd terms in current and energy-momentum tensor correlation functions that encode these modes and determine their electromagnetic and gravitational anomaly coefficients. Our analysis therefore applies to general time-reversal breaking (2+1)d CFTs, beyond the free Dirac transition. In particular, the analysis of the gravitational anomaly is also applicable to the free Majorana CFT governing the transition between a trivial superconductor and a topological superconductor. We also extend our results to more general Chern number changing transitions and to the transition between a (3+1)d topological insulator and a trivial insulator.
The hallmark of two-dimensional chiral topological phases is the existence of anomalous gapless modes at the spatial boundary. Yet, the manifestation of this edge anomaly within the bulk ground-state wavefunction itself remains only partially understood. In this work, we introduce a family of multipartite entanglement measures that probe chirality directly from the bulk wavefunction. Our construction involves applying different permutations between replicas of the ground state wavefunction in neighboring spatial regions, creating "permutation defects" at the boundaries between these regions. We provide general arguments for the robustness of these measures and develop a field-theoretical framework to compute them systematically. While the standard topological field theory prescription misses the chiral contribution, our method correctly identifies it as the chiral conformal field theory partition function on high-genus Riemann surfaces. This feature is a consequence of the bulk-edge correspondence, which dictates that any regularization of the theory at the permutation defects must introduce gapless boundary modes. We numerically verify our results with both free-fermion and strongly-interacting chiral topological states and find excellent agreement. Our results enable the extraction of the chiral central charge and the Hall conductance using a finite number of wavefunction replicas, making these quantities accessible to Monte-Carlo numerical techniques and noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices.
The disorder operator is often designed to reveal the conformal field theory (CFT) information in quantum many-body systems. By using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulation, we study the scaling behavior of disorder operators on the boundary in the two-dimensional Heisenberg model on the square-octagon lattice with gapless topological edge state. In the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki phase, the disorder operator is shown to hold the perimeter scaling with a logarithmic term associated with the Luttinger liquid parameter K. This effective Luttinger liquid parameter K reflects the low-energy physics and CFT for (1+1)D boundary. At bulk critical point, the effective K is suppressed but it keeps finite value, indicating the coupling between the gapless edge state and bulk fluctuation. The logarithmic term numerically captures this coupling picture, which reveals the (1+1)D SU(2)_{1} CFT and (2+1)D O(3) CFT at boundary criticality. Our Letter paves a new way to study the exotic boundary state and boundary criticality.
Topological insulators (superconductors) are materials that host symmetry-protected metallic edge states in an insulating (superconducting) bulk. Although they are well understood, a thermodynamic description of these materials remained elusive, firstly because the edges yield a non-extensive contribution to the thermodynamic potential, and secondly because topological field theories involve non-local order parameters, and cannot be captured by the Ginzburg-Landau formalism. Recently, this challenge has been overcome: by using Hill thermodynamics to describe the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in two dimensions, it was shown that at the topological phase transition the thermodynamic potential does not scale extensively due to boundary effects. Here, we extend this approach to different topological models in various dimensions (the Kitaev chain and Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model in one dimension, the Kane-Mele model in two dimensions and the Bernevig-Hughes-Zhang model in three dimensions) at zero temperature. Surprisingly, all models exhibit the same universal behavior in the order of the topological-phase transition, depending on the dimension. Moreover, we derive the topological phase diagram at finite temperature using this thermodynamic description, and show that it displays a good agreement with the one calculated from the Uhlmann phase. Our work reveals unexpected universalities and opens the path to a thermodynamic description of systems with a non-local order parameter.
The chiral central charge
c measures the gravitational anomaly of a two-dimensional topological phase. It fixes the heat current carried along the edge. So far, it has been accessed through thermal transport, where phonons complicate the signal, or through wave-function probes that need a pure ground state. Here we show that
c is a spectroscopic quantity of the edge. A weak modulation of the edge couplings that travel along the edge is absorbed according to the Virasoro algebra. Normalized by the response to a static change of the same couplings, the absorbed weights obey
Dn=2n⟨L0⟩+12c(n3−n), so that
C≡2D2−4D1=c in any state of the ideal edge theory, thermal or not. The central charge thus appears in transition weights, although it cancels from excitation gaps. The ratio of line weights with and without a vison in the bulk,
Λ=4hσ/c, needs no calibration and fixes the conformal spin
hσ of the non-Abelian Ising anyon. For the Kitaev honeycomb spin liquid we find
C=0.49999 and
hσ=0.06250 on 7168 spins. Calibrating with the shift of the measured line itself gives
c within about
1% on 96 spins and within
1% under
20% random coupling errors. Interacting edge Majoranas in a fixed flux sector, treated with DMRG, keep
C within
1.5% while the edge velocity changes by
±13%. An exact simulation of a quantum-processor protocol, including the native Floquet circuit, returns
c within
3.5% on 96 to 600 spins.