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arXiv:2405.07970 · Physical Review X

How Much Entanglement Is Needed for Topological Codes and Mixed States with Anomalous Symmetry?

Zhi Li, Dongjin Lee, Beni Yoshida

Published May 15, 2025• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

It is known that particles with exotic properties can emerge in systems made of simple constituents such as qubits, due to long-range quantum entanglement. In this paper, we provide quantitative characterizations of entanglement necessary for emergent anyons and fermions by using the geometric entanglement measure (GEM), which quantifies the maximal overlap between a given state and any short-range-entangled states. For systems with emergent anyons, based on the braiding statistics, we show that the GEM scales linearly in the system size regardless of microscopic details. The phenomenon of emergent anyons can also be understood within the framework of quantum error correction (QEC). Specifically, we show that the GEM of any 2D stabilizer codes must be at least quadratic in the code distance. Our proof is based on a generic prescription for constructing string operators, establishing a rigorous and direct connection between emergent anyons and QEC. For systems with emergent fermions, despite that the ground state subspaces could be exponentially huge and their coding properties could be rather poor, we show that the GEM also scales linearly in the system size. Our analysis establishes an intriguing link between quantum anomaly and entanglement: A quantum state respecting anomalous 1-form symmetries must be long-range entangled and have large GEM. Our results also extend to mixed states, such as the Z X -dephased toric code, providing a provably nontrivial class of intrinsically mixed-state phases.

DOI
10.1103/pw12-kdjx

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It is known that particles with exotic properties can emerge in systems made of simple constituents such as qubits, due to long-range quantum entanglement. In this paper, we provide quantitative characterizations of entanglement necessary for emergent anyons and fermions by using the geometric entanglement measure (GEM), which quantifies the maximal overlap between a given state and any short-range-entangled states. For systems with emergent anyons, based on the braiding statistics, we show that the GEM scales linearly in the system size regardless of microscopic details. The phenomenon of emergent anyons can also be understood within the framework of quantum error correction (QEC). Specifically, we show that the GEM of any 2D stabilizer codes must be at least quadratic in the code distance. Our proof is based on a generic prescription for constructing string operators, establishing a rigorous and direct connection between emergent anyons and QEC. For systems with emergent fermions, despite that the ground state subspaces could be exponentially huge and their coding properties could be rather poor, we show that the GEM also scales linearly in the system size. Our analysis establishes an intriguing link between quantum anomaly and entanglement: A quantum state respecting anomalous 1-form symmetries must be long-range entangled and have large GEM. Our results also extend to mixed states, such as the Z X -dephased toric code, providing a provably nontrivial class of intrinsically mixed-state phases.
We show that generic gapped quantum many-body states which respect an anomalous finite higher-form symmetry have an exponentially small overlap with any short-range entangled (SRE) state. Hence, anomalies of higher-form symmetries enforce intrinsicintrinsicintrinsic long-range entanglement, which is in contrast with anomalies of ordinary (0-form) symmetries which are compatible with symmetric SRE states (specifically, symmetric cat states). As an application, we show that the anomalies of strong higher-form symmetries provide a diagnostic for mixed-state topological order in d≥2d \geq 2d≥2 spatial dimensions. We also identify a new (3+1)D intrinsic mixed-state topological order that does not obey remote-detectability by local decoherence of the (3+1)D Toric Code with fermionic loop excitations. This breakdown of remote detectability, as encoded in anomalies of strong higher-form symmetries, provides a partial characterization of intrinsically mixed-state topological order.
It is commonly believed that logical states of quantum error-correcting codes have to be highly entangled such that codes capable of correcting more errors require more entanglement to encode a qubit. Here, we show that the validity of this belief depends on the specific code and the choice of entanglement measure. To this end, we characterize a tradeoff between the code distance d quantifying the number of correctable errors, and the geometric entanglement measure of logical states quantifying their maximal overlap with product states or more general "topologically trivial" states. The maximum overlap is shown to be exponentially small in d for three families of codes: (1) low-density parity check codes with commuting check operators, (2) stabilizer codes, and (3) codes with a constant encoding rate. Equivalently, the geometric entanglement of any logical state of these codes grows at least linearly with d. On the opposite side, we also show that this distance-entanglement tradeoff does not hold in general. For any constant d and k (number of logical qubits), we show there exists a family of codes such that the geometric entanglement of some logical states approaches zero in the limit of large code length.
We study how the color code under decoherence gives rise to an intrinsic mixed-state topological order (imTO), which has no counterpart in pure ground states of local gapped Hamiltonians. For decoherence induced by XX-type operators on red links of the honeycomb lattice, we show that the resulting mixed state inherits half of the topological properties of the color code, including anyon content, logical operators, and topological entanglement structure. Using a gauging procedure for mixed stabilizer states, we identify the emergent phase as closely related to a single toric code. We characterize this phase by topological entanglement negativity (TEN) and perform efficient stabilizer-formalism simulations. While the pure color code has TEN=2ln⁡2{\rm TEN} = 2 \ln 2TEN=2ln2, the maximally decohered state has TEN=ln⁡2{\rm TEN} = \ln 2TEN=ln2, indicating emergence of a single toric code. By tuning the decoherence strength, we find a smooth crossover in TEN accompanied by a pronounced, nearly system-size-independent peak in its variance. We further show that the negativity exhibits characteristic scaling only for subsystem partitions commensurate with the triangular lattice of the emergent toric code. Our results demonstrate that negativity-based quantities provide powerful probes of mixed-state topological order generated by decoherence.
Decoherence is a major obstacle to the preparation of topological order in noisy intermediate-scale quantum devices. Here, we show that decoherence can also give rise to new types of topological order. Specifically, we construct concrete examples by proliferating fermionic anyons in the toric code via local quantum channels. The resulting mixed states retain long-range entanglement, which manifests in the nonzero topological entanglement negativity, though the topological quantum memory is destroyed by decoherence. By comparison with the gapless spin liquid in pure states, we show that the identified states represent a novel intrinsic mixed-state topological order, which has no counterpart in pure states. Through the lens of quantum anomalies of 1-form symmetries, we then provide general constructions of intrinsic mixed-state topological order and reveal the existence of nonbosonic deconfined anyons as another key feature of these novel phases. The extended meaning and characterization of deconfined excitations and their statistics in mixed states are clarified. Moreover, when these deconfined anyons have nontrivial braiding statistics, we prove that the mixed states cannot be prepared via finite-depth local quantum channels from any bipartite separable states. We further demonstrate our construction using the decohered Kitaev honeycomb model and the decohered double-semion model. In the latter case, a surprising scenario arises where decoherence gives rise to additional types of deconfined anyons.
Discovering quantum orders in mixed many-body systems is an ongoing issue. Very recently, the notion of an intrinsic mixed state topologically-ordered (IMTO) state was proposed. As a concrete example, we observe the emergence of IMTO by studying the toric code system under stochastic maximal decoherence by ZXZXZX-diagonal type projective measurement without monitoring. We study how the toric code state changes to an IMTO state at the level of the averaged quantum trajectories. This phase transition is understood from the viewpoint of spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) of 1-form weak symmetry, that is, the IMTO is characterized by the symmetry restoration from the SSB, which comes from the proliferation of anyons. To understand the emergent IMTO, order and disorder parameters of 1-form symmetry are numerically studied by stabilizer simulation. The present study clarifies the existence of two distinct microscopic string operators for the fermionic anyons, that leads to distinct fermionic strong and weak 1-form symmetries, and also the obtained critical exponents indicate strong relation between IMTO and percolation.
Abstract Topological quantum error correcting codes have emerged as leading candidates towards the goal of achieving large-scale fault-tolerant quantum computers. However, quantifying entanglement in these systems of large size in the presence of noise is a challenging task. In this paper, we provide two different prescriptions to characterize noisy stabilizer states, including the surface and the color codes, in terms of localizable entanglement over a subset of qubits. In one approach, we exploit appropriately constructed entanglement witness operators to estimate a witness-based lower bound of localizable entanglement, which is directly accessible in experiments. In the other recipe, we use graph states that are local unitary equivalent to the stabilizer state to determine a computable measurement-based lower bound of localizable entanglement. If used experimentally, this translates to a lower bound of localizable entanglement obtained from single-qubit measurements in specific bases to be performed on the qubits outside the subsystem of interest. Towards computing these lower bounds, we discuss in detail the methodology of obtaining a local unitary equivalent graph state from a stabilizer state, which includes a new and scalable geometric recipe as well as an algebraic method that applies to general stabilizer states of arbitrary size. Moreover, as a crucial step of the latter recipe, we develop a scalable graph-transformation algorithm that creates a link between two specific nodes in a graph using a sequence of local complementation operations. We develop open-source Python packages for these transformations, and illustrate the methodology by applying it to a noisy topological color code, and study how the witness and measurement-based lower bounds of localizable entanglement varies with the distance between the chosen qubits.