Although in general boundary conditions do not affect the bulk properties of a system, some of them are special and defy such expectation. This is the case, for instance, of those inducing geometrical frustration in a classical magnet. Recently, the study of such settings in quantum systems (dubbed topological frustration) has uncovered peculiar features, interesting both from a fundamental and technological point of view. In this work, we present and discuss the behavior of several quantum resources in presence of TF, namely the (disconnected) entanglement entropy and the non-stabilizerness Renyi entropy. We will show that, compared to their non-frustrated counterparts, TF adds a distinct contribution to these resources, due to a stable, delocalized, topological excitation. Remarkably, this contribution can be calculated analytically, due to its similarities with that of a W-state.
Although in general boundary conditions do not affect the bulk properties of a system, some of them are special and defy such expectation. This is the case, for instance, of those inducing geometrical frustration in a classical magnet. Recently, the study of such settings in quantum systems (dubbed topological frustration) has uncovered peculiar features, interesting both from a fundamental and technological point of view. In this work, we present and discuss the behavior of several quantum resources in presence of TF, namely the (disconnected) entanglement entropy and the non-stabilizerness Renyi entropy. We will show that, compared to their non-frustrated counterparts, TF adds a distinct contribution to these resources, due to a stable, delocalized, topological excitation. Remarkably, this contribution can be calculated analytically, due to its similarities with that of a W-state.
We advance the characterization of complexity in quantum many-body systems by examining W W -states embedded in a spin chain. Such states show an amount of non-stabilizerness or “magic”, measured as the Stabilizer Rényi Entropy, that grows logarithmically with the number of qubits/spins. We focus on systems whose Hamiltonian admits a classical point with extensive degeneracy. Near these points, a Clifford circuit can convert the ground state into a W W -state, while in the rest of the phase to which the classical point belongs, it is dressed with local quantum correlations. Topological frustrated quantum spin-chains host phases with the desired phenomenology, and we show that their ground state’s Stabilizer Rényi Entropy is the sum of that of the W W -states plus an extensive local contribution. Our work reveals that W W -states/frustrated ground states display a non-local degree of complexity that can be harvested as a quantum resource and has no counterpart in GHZ states/non-frustrated systems.
The study of entanglement and magic properties in topologically frustrated systems suggests that, in the thermodynamic limit, these quantities decompose into two distinct contributions. One is determined by the specific nature of the model and its Hamiltonian, and another arises from topological frustration itself, resulting in being independent of the Hamiltonian's parameters. In this work, we test the generality of this picture by investigating an additional quantum resource, namely, quantum coherence, in two different models where topological frustration is induced through an appropriate choice of boundary conditions. Our findings reveal a perfect analogy between the behavior of quantum coherence and that of other quantum resources, particularly magic, providing further evidence in support of the universality of this picture and the topological nature of this source of frustration.
Recently it was highlighted that one-dimensional antiferromagnetic spin models with frustrated boundary conditions, i.e. periodic boundary conditions in a ring with an odd number of elements, may show very peculiar behavior. Indeed the presence of frustrated boundary conditions can destroy the local magnetic orders presented by the models when different boundary conditions are taken into account and induce novel phase transitions. Motivated by these results, we analyze the effects of the introduction of frustrated boundary conditions on several models supporting (symmetry protected) topological orders, and compare our results with the ones obtained with different boundary conditions. None of the topological order phases analyzed are altered by this change. This observation leads naturally to the conjecture that topological phases of one-dimensional systems are in general not affected by topological frustration.
We pursue the identification of quantum resources carried by topological order, by evaluating quantum magic, quantified through the rank-2 Stabilizer Rényi entropy M2, in one-dimensional systems hosting symmetry-protected topological phases (SPTP). Focusing on models with an exact duality between an SPTP and a trivial one, namely the dimerized XX and the Cluster-Ising chains, we show that dual points exhibit identical amounts of magic, even thought they belong to distinct topological sectors. A subextensive asymmetry arises only under open boundary conditions, where edge effects break the duality, but this correction is non-topological and depends on microscopic parameters. These results stand in contrast to the case of topological frustration, where delocalized excitations enhance the magic logarithmically with system size. They also complement recent analyses in the literature, showing that the total magic is largely insensitive to the presence of topological order, hence suggesting that topological order is not necessarily a genuine computational resource.
Frustration in many-body spin systems is a situation where the spins cannot orient themselves to fully minimize the interactions with their neighbors. It is caused, in general, by competing interactions or by the lattice structure, as in the antiferromagnets on non-bipartite lattices. Over the years frustrated systems have been studied substantially, since frustration can destabilize the antiferromagnetic order, lead to different phases of matter and induce various exotic properties. Frustration can be caused also by a choice of boundary conditions, i.e. the lattice topology. For instance, a ring with an odd number of sites is non-bipartite, which makes antiferromagnets in this setting frustrated. The subject of this thesis are zero-temperature one-dimensional quantum systems exactly in this setting. The major content is discussing how such a simple setting can influence the antiferromagnetic order, by studying spin-1/2 chains with discrete symmetries, whose breaking is related to the onset of the order. After reviewing the known results on topological frustration, dealing with non-thermodynamic quantities, we develop an approach for studying symmetry breaking, that is both suitable for exact analytical computations and meaningful for discussing the order also in a finite system. It consists of the realization that many spin-1/2 chains without external magnetic fields, such as the quantum XY chain, possess anticommuting global symmetries when the number of lattice sites is an odd number, implying the ground-state degeneracy already in a finite system. In this framework, we discover that topological frustration, despite being induced only by the choice of boundary conditions and even/odd system size choice, can affect the magnetization in the thermodynamic limit and system's quantum phase transitions. We find that topological frustration can destroy local order, create a site-dependent magnetization that varies in space with an incommensurate pattern, induce a first-order quantum phase transition that is not present without frustration and modify the nature of a second-order transition, by destroying local order at both sides of the transition and preserving only non-local string order parameters. All these results indicate the incompleteness of the approach to quantum many-body systems, based on the Ginzburg-Landau theory, that tries to capture the properties of the system by taking the system size to infinity before computing the observables and neglects the influence of the chain length as a relevant scale. We find that topological frustration can affect also non-equilibrium properties, by considering a local quantum quench setup. Namely, we study the Loschmidt echo and find it displays qualitatively and quantitatively different behavior for antiferromagnetic rings with an even and odd number of sites. Most of all, the differences become clearer for large system sizes, thus allowing to distinguish in a simple out-of-equilibrium experiment a system made by a certain, large, number of spins from the one with a single additional spin. The thesis also contains a mathematical part. In studying order parameters of models mappable to free fermions, Toeplitz determinants with symbols that possess a part proportional to the delta function arise. We derive asymptotic formulas for this type of determinants.
Topological order comes in different forms, and its classification and detection is an important field of modern research. In this work, we show that the Disconnected Entanglement Entropy, a measure originally introduced to identify topological phases, is also able to unveil the long-range entanglement (LRE) carried by a single, fractionalized excitation. We show this by considering a quantum, delocalized domain wall excitation that can be introduced into a system by inducing geometric frustration in an antiferromagnetic spin chain. Furthermore, we show that the LRE of such systems is resilient against a quantum quench and the introduction of disorder, as it happens in traditional symmetry-protected topological phases. All these evidences establish the existence of a new phase induced by frustration with topological features despite not being of the usual type.