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arXiv:2211.14106 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Real-space circuit complexity as a probe of phase diagrams

Nishan C. Jayarama, Viktor Svensson

Published Feb 9, 2023• 7 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Circuit complexity has been used as a tool to study various properties in condensed matter systems, in particular as a way to probe the phase diagram. However, compared with measures based on entanglement, complexity has been found lacking. We show that when imposing penalty factors punishing nonlocality, it becomes a much stronger probe of the phase diagram, able to probe more subtle features. We do this by deriving analytical solutions for the complexity in the XY chain with transverse field.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.107.075122

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•Jul 14, 2017•0 citations
Circuit complexity has been used as a tool to study various properties in condensed matter systems, in particular as a way to probe the phase diagram. However, compared with measures based on entanglement, complexity has been found lacking. We show that when imposing penalty factors punishing nonlocality, it becomes a much stronger probe of the phase diagram, able to probe more subtle features. We do this by deriving analytical solutions for the complexity in the XY chain with transverse field.
We investigate the Lee--Yang zeros (LYZ) of inhomogeneous anisotropic XY spin chains with Dzyaloshinskii--Moriya (DM) interactions in the complex transverse-field plane, focusing on their fundamental connection to quantum phase transitions. We systematically study uniform chains, period-2 and period-3 modulated chains, and Fibonacci quasiperiodic chains of lengths 5 and 8. As the DM coupling strength DDD increases, the LYZ exhibit qualitatively distinct topological evolutions on the complex plane: the complex zeros of the uniform chain collapse toward the real axis; periodic chains feature either bifurcation of closed zero contours before all zeros become real or a single re-emergence of complex zeros; quasiperiodic chains exhibit repeated annihilation and revival of complex zeros. Analytical derivations demonstrate that this diverse behavior originates from DM-induced shifts of folded bands and the modulation of zero positions by anisotropic pairing at particle--hole band crossings. Our results establish a direct correspondence between LYZ topology and band deformation: isolated contact points of zeros with the real axis correspond to discrete quantum critical fields, while continuous real-zero intervals directly identify gapless chiral phases. Accordingly, beyond locating phase boundaries, LYZ can distinguish characteristic phases and serve as an intuitive probe for band folding and phase diagram restructuring.
A bstract Quantum complexity of conformal field theory (CFT) states has recently gained significant attention, both as a diagnostic tool in condensed matter systems and in connection with holographic observables probing black hole interiors. Previous studies have primarily focused on cases where all generators of the conformal group contribute equally to the cost of building a circuit. In this work, we present a general framework for studying the complexity of circuits in generic Lie groups, where penalty factors assign relative weights to different generators. Our approach constructs a metric on the coset space of quantum states, induced from a (pseudo-)Riemannian norm on the space of unitary circuits. The geodesics of this metric are interpreted as optimal circuits. The method builds on the formalism of (pseudo-)Riemannian submersions and connects naturally to other prescriptions in the literature, including cost function minimization along stabilizer directions and constructions based on coadjoint orbits. As a concrete application, we compute state complexity for states in one- and two-dimensional CFTs. For specific choices of penalty factors, our prescription yields a positive-definite metric with a viable interpretation as complexity; in other cases, the resulting metric is indefinite. In the viable regime, we derive analytic results when a specific penalty factor is turned off, develop perturbative expansions for small values of the penalty factors, and provide numerical results in the general case. We comment on the relation of our measure of complexity to holography.
Entanglement and circuit complexity are fundamental concepts in quantum information theory which turned out to have considerable applications in various contexts ranging from many-body systems and condensed matter theory to quantum gravity and black hole physics. In order to find connections between these aspects, an insightful approach consists in comparing the complexity with some entanglement measures of a given bipartition, as for instance the Von Neumann entanglement entropy. Since, for a system in a given quantum state, the bipartite entanglement can be determined once a spatial subsystem and its complement are chosen, this comparison has to be made considering the complexity of reduced density matrices. This motivates the development of techniques for determining the circuit complexity of mixed states. In this thesis, focussing on free bosonic systems, we study the circuit complexity of mixed Gaussian states by employing the Fisher information geometry for the covariance matrices. This approach allows computing the complexity between reduced density matrices (subsystem complexity), as well as the complexity between thermal states. It also leads to a precise prescription for computing the spectrum and the basis complexity and the temporal evolution of the subsystem complexity after global and local quantum quenches. The study of the subsystem complexity of a given bipartition and a complete characterisation of its entanglement requires the detailed knowledge of the corresponding reduced density matrix, or, equivalently, of the entanglement Hamiltonian. A part of this thesis is devoted to determining the entanglement Hamiltonians in free theories. At equilibrium, we consider gapless systems, with the aim of recovering the underlying CFT results, and gapped lattice models. The evolution of entanglement Hamiltonians in quantum chains after a global quench is also studied. In addition, other entanglement quantifiers, as the entanglement spectrum and the contour for the entanglement entropies, are discussed in some of these settings. Finally, motivated by theoretical and experimental advances, we also address the issue of how the entanglement splits into the different charge sectors of a system endowed with a U(1) symmetry. We focus in particular on massive theories, either continuous or on the lattice, and we try to understand whether the entanglement equipartition, which is known to characterise gapless systems, survives away from criticality.
topological phase transitions. Moreover, we show that the locality property of the real-space optimal Hamiltonian connecting two different ground states depends crucially on whether the two states belong to the same or different phases. This provides a concrete example of classifying different gapped phases using Nielsen's circuit complexity. We further generalize our results to a Kitaev chain with long-range pairing, and we discuss generalizations to higher dimensions. Our result opens up an avenue for using circuit complexity as a tool to understand quantum many-body systems.
The XY chain in a transverse field is a prototypical exactly solvable model with interesting and desirable properties: its two-dimensional phase diagram, characterized by an anisotropy parameter and the strength of an external magnetic field, hosts two different quantum phase transitions at zero temperature, while the model can always be mapped into a system of free (spin-less) fermions. One of the phase transitions is the universality of free fermions (c = 1 CFT), while the other is that of the 1D quantum Ising model (c = 1=2 CFT). As a matter of fact, the XY chain is a generalization of the Ising chain. While both lines of phase transitions can be described by Conformal Field Theory, the bi-critical point at which these lines meet is non-conformal, since it has a quadratic spectrum. The aim of this thesis is to observe the non-conformal nature of the bi-critical point in the XY chain in a numerical experiment trough quantities accessible also in non-exactly solvable models, such as the entanglement entropy and the eigenvalues of the reduced density matrix. In this way, we want to propose in the future numerical tests whether a multi-critical point in an arbitrary model is conformal or not. First we introduce the XY chain and using standard analytical methods find its microscopic solution. Like the Ising model, the XY chain has a phase of broken Z2 symmetry, where the model shows two degenerate ground states in the thermodynamic limit of infinite system length. Having noticed a scarcity of results on the exact energy degeneracy between two putative ground states, we examine the problem using numerical and analytical methods. The analytical method, employing complex analysis and Fourier series, has given a definite answer for the Ising model. Using this method for the more general XY chain we find the dependence of the exact degeneracy on the number of spins in the special case of zero magnetic field and show the absence of an exact degeneracy when the anisotropy is greater than 1 and the number of spins is even. Coming back to the main aim of the thesis, we derive the reduced density matrix eigenvalues and the entanglement entropy in the XY chain and construct a numerical algorithm for calculating them. We accomplish to discriminate the non-conformal nature of the bi-critical point by comparing the entanglement entropy and the largest reduced density matrix eigenvalue with the conformal field theory predictions near and far from the bi-critical point.