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arXiv:2112.04483 · Quantum

Symmetry Protected Topological Order in Open Quantum Systems

Caroline de Groot, Alex Turzillo, Norbert Schuch

Published Nov 10, 2022• 109 citations
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Abstract

We systematically investigate the robustness of symmetry protected topological (SPT) order in open quantum systems by studying the evolution of string order parameters and other probes under noisy channels. We find that one-dimensional SPT order is robust against noisy couplings to the environment that satisfy a strong symmetry condition, while it is destabilized by noise that satisfies only a weak symmetry condition, which generalizes the notion of symmetry for closed systems. We also discuss "transmutation" of SPT phases into other SPT phases of equal or lesser complexity, under noisy channels that satisfy twisted versions of the strong symmetry condition.

DOI
10.22331/q-2022-11-10-856

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We systematically investigate the robustness of symmetry protected topological (SPT) order in open quantum systems by studying the evolution of string order parameters and other probes under noisy channels. We find that one-dimensional SPT order is robust against noisy couplings to the environment that satisfy a strong symmetry condition, while it is destabilized by noise that satisfies only a weak symmetry condition, which generalizes the notion of symmetry for closed systems. We also discuss "transmutation" of SPT phases into other SPT phases of equal or lesser complexity, under noisy channels that satisfy twisted versions of the strong symmetry condition.
Topological order offers possibilities for processing quantum information that can be immune to imperfections. However, the question of its stability out of equilibrium is relevant for experiments, where coupling to an environment is unavoidable. In this work, we demonstrate the robustness of certain aspects of Z 2 × Z 2 symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order against a wide class of dissipation channels in the Lindblad and quantum trajectory formalisms of an open quantum system. This is illustrated using the one-dimensional Z X Z cluster Hamiltonian along with Pauli-string jump operators. We show that certain choices of dissipation retaining strong symmetries support a steady-state manifold consisting of two nonlocal qubits and for Hamiltonian perturbations preserving the global symmetry, states in this manifold remain metastable. In contrast, this metastability is destroyed upon breaking the above-mentioned symmetry. While the localized qubits of the cluster Hamiltonian are not conserved by the Lindbladian evolution, they do correspond to weak symmetries and thus retain a memory of their initial state at all times in the quantum trajectories. We utilize this feature to construct protocols to retrieve the quantum information either by monitoring jumps or error mitigation. Our work thus proposes a novel framework to study the dynamics of dissipative SPT phases and opens up the possibility of engineering entangled states relevant to quantum information processing. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
In open quantum systems, the interaction of the system with its environment gives rise to two types of symmetry: a strong one, where the system's symmetry charge is conserved exactly, and a weak one, where the system can exchange symmetry charge with the environment but still preserve symmetry at the ensemble level. While generic open quantum systems feature weak symmetries only, the symmetry-protected topological response for bosonic (spin) systems has only been considered in the stricter setup with additional strong symmetries. Here, we address the generic case and demonstrate that weak symmetries alone can protect topological responses that distinguish different phases of matter. For bosonic systems, focusing on one-dimensional mixed states described by locally purifiable density operators, we propose a quantized response characterizing qualitatively distinct phases. It is detectable via the decay behavior of different string order parameters. We illustrate our general results through a noisy Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki model. In particular, we show that the coupling to the environment can induce a phase transition to a state protected by weak symmetries, without a pure-state or strong-symmetry analog.
It is a challenging problem to correctly characterize the symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases in open quantum systems. As the measurement-based quantum computation (MBQC) utilizes non-trivial edge states of the SPT phases as the logical qubit, its computational power is closely tied to the non-trivial topological nature of the phases. In this paper, we propose to use the gate fidelity which is a measure of the computational power of the MBQC to identify the SPT phases in mixed-state settings. Specifically, we investigate the robustness of the Haldane phase by considering the MBQC on the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki state subject to different types of noises. To illustrate how our criterion works, we analytically and numerically calculated the gate fidelity to find that its behavior depends crucially on whether the noises satisfy a certain symmetry condition with respect to the on-site Z2×Z2\mathbb{Z}_2 \times \mathbb{Z}_2Z2​×Z2​ symmetry. In particular, the fidelity for the identity gate, which is given by the sum of the non-local string order parameters, plays an important role. Furthermore, we demonstrate that a stronger symmetry conditions are required to be able to perform other (e.g., the ZZZ-rotation gate) gates with high fidelity. By examining which unitary gates can be implemented with the MBQC on the decohered states, we can gain a useful insight into the richer structure of noisy SPT states that cannot be captured solely by the string order parameters.
Although symmetry-protected topological phases (SPTs) can be distinguished by their entanglement properties, it has been unclear how to extract this information directly from expectation values beyond the 1D case. Here, we close this gap and propose a pair of nonlocal order parameters that can detect and distinguish all bosonic SPTs in 2D protected by internal discrete, Abelian unitary symmetries. The desired topological invariants are extracted by these quantities by effectively simulating the SPT path integral on topologically non-trivial spacetime manifolds. Our order parameters are defined in terms of expectation values of partial symmetry and permutation operations acting on fixed numbers of replicas of the system in finite spatial regions. These expectation values correspond to symmetry-twisted versions of multipartite entanglement quantities known as multi-entropies. We show explicitly that our two order parameters detect symmetry-protected four-party and six-party entanglement, respectively, and we constrain possible "spurious" contributions. We analytically test our proposal in fixed-point lattice models. Our results suggest multipartite entanglement to be a defining feature of SPTs; indeed, we expect our methods to generalize to fermionic and higher-dimensional systems.
Abstract We study the entanglement structure of symmetry-protected topological (SPT) phases from an operational point of view by considering entanglement distillation in the presence of symmetries. We demonstrate that non-trivial SPT phases in one-dimension necessarily contain some entanglement which is inaccessible if the symmetry is enforced. More precisely, we consider the setting of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) where the local operations commute with a global onsite symmetry group G, which we call G-LOCC, and we define the inaccessible entanglement E inacc as the entanglement that cannot be used for distillation under G-LOCC. We derive a tight bound on E inacc which demonstrates a direct relation between inaccessible entanglement and the SPT phase, namely log ( D ω 2 ) ⩽ E i n a c c ⩽ log ( | G | ) , where D ω is the topologically protected edge mode degeneracy of the SPT phase ω with symmetry G. For particular phases such as the Haldane phase, D ω = | G | so the bound becomes an equality. We numerically investigate the distribution of states throughout the bound, and show that typically the region near the upper bound is highly populated, and also determine the nature of those states lying on the upper and lower bounds. We then discuss the relation of E inacc to string order parameters, and also the extent to which it can be used to distinguish different SPT phases of matter.
We propose a bulk order parameter for extracting symmetry-protected topological (SPT) invariants of quantum many-body mixed states on a two dimensional lattice using partial symmetries. The procedure builds on the partial symmetry order parameter recently developed by some of the authors to study SPT phases of pure states and adapts them to the decohered setting. For a symmetry G=E×AG = E \times AG=E×A where EEE is a strong symmetry and AAA is a weak symmetry, we show that the partial symmetry order parameter detects SPT invariants jointly protected by EEE and AAA. We demonstrate this explicitly using a class of mixed states obtained from CZX-type models with Z2×Z2\mathbb{Z}_2\times\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​×Z2​ symmetry and subjecting them to noise that weakens one of the Z2\mathbb{Z}_2Z2​ symmetries. We also comment on the practical detection of SPT invariants in quantum simulators through randomized measurements.