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arXiv:2606.26235

Measures of Chirality in Mixed-State Topological Phases

Shijun Sun, Bader Aldossari, Rasmit Devkota, Zhu-Xi Luo

quant-phcond-mat.stat-mechcond-mat.str-elSubmitted Jun 24, 2026• Announced Jun 26, 2026• 0 citations
v1 · Jun 24, 2026v2 · Sep 4, 2026
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Abstract

What does it mean for a mixed-state topological phase to be chiral? Mathematically, chirality can be sharply characterized through the symmetry algebra of the mixed state. Physically, however, the question is far more subtle. In pure states, chirality in topological phase is tied to a web of familiar diagnostics, involving bulk-boundary correspondence, a gapless entanglement spectrum, a nontrivial modular commutator, and a quantized thermal Hall response. We show that none of these diagnostics remain reliable in mixed states. Instead, for decohered topological phases with a known error-free parent state, we propose two relative-entropy-based measures that can diagnose chirality, with one of them further extracting the chiral central charge. Our results emphasize how mixed-state topology demands intrinsically new diagnostics beyond direct analogues of pure-state probes.

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6+9 pages, 3+6 figures

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What does it mean for a mixed-state topological phase to be chiral? Mathematically, chirality can be sharply characterized through the symmetry algebra of the mixed state. Physically, however, the question is far more subtle. In pure states, chirality in topological phase is tied to a web of familiar diagnostics, involving bulk-boundary correspondence, a gapless entanglement spectrum, a nontrivial modular commutator, and a quantized thermal Hall response. We show that none of these diagnostics remain reliable in mixed states. Instead, for decohered topological phases with a known error-free parent state, we propose two relative-entropy-based measures that can diagnose chirality, with one of them further extracting the chiral central charge. Our results emphasize how mixed-state topology demands intrinsically new diagnostics beyond direct analogues of pure-state probes.
Topological phases of matter offer a promising platform for quantum computation and quantum error correction. Nevertheless, unlike its counterpart in pure states, descriptions of topological order in mixed states remain relatively underexplored. Our work gives two definitions for replica topological order in mixed states, which involve nnn copies of density matrices of the mixed state. Our framework categorizes topological orders in mixed states as either quantum, classical, or trivial, depending on the type of information that can be encoded. For the case of the toric code model in the presence of decoherence, we associate for each phase a quantum channel and describes the structure of the code space. We show that in the quantum-topological phase, there exists a postselection-based error correction protocol that recovers the quantum information, while in the classical-topological phase, the quantum information has decohere and cannot be fully recovered. We accomplish this by describing the mixed state as a projected entangled pairs state (PEPS) and identifying the symmetry-protected topological order of its boundary state to the bulk topology. Using this formalism, we enumerate all the possible mixed state phases which result from applying a local decoherence channel to the toric code. In addition to the classical-topological phases that have been previously reported on, we also find mixed states exhibiting chiral topological order. We discuss the extent that our findings can be extrapolated to $n\ensuremath{\rightarrow}1$ limit.
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 chiral central charge c−c_-c−​ is a key topological invariant of the edge characterizing the bulk two-dimensional chiral topological order, but its direct evaluation in microscopic spin models has long been a challenge, especially for non-abelian topological order. Building on the recently developed modular commutator formalism, we numerically obtain c−c_-c−​ directly from single ground-state wave functions of two-dimensional interacting spin models that have chiral topological order. This provides a geometry-independent and bulk diagnostic of chirality. We study two nonintegrable systems -- the Zeeman-Kitaev honeycomb model and the kagome antiferromagnet -- both subjected to scalar spin chirality perturbations. We find that the modular commutator yields results consistent with the expected topological quantum field theories. We also compute the topological entanglement entropy which provides an independent diagnostic of the topological orders. Our work establishes modular commutators as a powerful numerical probe of chiral topological order in strongly correlated quantum magnets.
Topological quantum memory can protect information against local errors up to finite error thresholds. Such thresholds are usually determined based on the success of decoding algorithms rather than the intrinsic properties of the mixed states describing corrupted memories. Here we provide an intrinsic characterization of the breakdown of topological quantum memory, which both gives a bound on the performance of decoding algorithms and provides examples of topologically distinct mixed states. We employ three information-theoretical quantities that can be regarded as generalizations of the diagnostics of ground-state topological order, and serve as a definition for topological order in error-corrupted mixed states. We consider the topological contribution to entanglement negativity and two other metrics based on quantum relative entropy and coherent information. In the concrete example of the two-dimensional (2D) Toric code with local bit-flip and phase errors, we map three quantities to observables in 2D classical spin models and analytically show they all undergo a transition at the same error threshold. This threshold is an upper bound on that achieved in any decoding algorithm and is indeed saturated by that in the optimal decoding algorithm for the Toric code. Published by the American Physical Society 2024
Global symmetries greatly enrich the landscape of topological quantum phases, playing an essential role from topological insulators to fractional quantum Hall effect. Topological phases in mixed quantum states, originating from decoherence in open quantum systems or disorders in imperfect crystalline solids, have recently garnered significant interest. Unlike pure states, mixed quantum states can exhibit average symmetries—symmetries that keep the total ensemble invariant but not on each individual state. In this work, we present a systematic classification and characterization of average symmetry-protected topological (ASPT) phases applicable to generic symmetry groups, encompassing both average and exact symmetries, for bosonic and fermionic systems. Moreover, we formulate the theory of average symmetry-enriched topological (ASET) orders in disordered bosonic systems. Our systematic approach helps clarify nuanced issues in previous literature and uncovers compelling new physics. Notably, we discover that (1) the definition and classification of ASPT phases in decohered and disordered systems exhibit subtle differences, (2) despite these differences, ASPT phases in both settings can be classified and characterized under a unified framework of defect decoration and spectral sequence, (3) this systematic classification uncovers a plethora of ASPT phases that are intrinsically mixed, implying they can exclusively manifest in decohered or disordered systems where part of the symmetry is average, and (4) similarly for ASET, we find intrinsically disordered phases exhibiting exotic anyon behaviors—the ground states of such phases necessarily contain localized anyons, with gapless (yet still localized) excitation blue spectra.
A defining feature of chirality is the distinction between a system and its mirror image. Despite extensive experimental observations of chiral phases and theoretical advances, a quantum-information theoretic characterization of chirality based solely on the entanglement structure of many-body quantum states remains elusive. Here, we introduce the notion of many-body chirality by formulating it as an obstruction to transforming a quantum state into its complex conjugate through finite-depth local operations. We rigorously establish many-body chirality for stabilizer realizations of Zd(k)\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}Zd(k)​ anyon theories, proving that complex conjugation can be implemented by local quantum channels if and only if the underlying anyon data are mirror invariant. This reveals forms of chirality that evade conventional diagnostics, including examples with vanishing modular commutator, vanishing chiral central charge, and commuting-projector realizations. We further show that this obstruction is intrinsically four-partite, while invisible to tripartite entanglement structure. Finally, we prove that Zd(k)\mathbb{Z}_d^{(k)}Zd(k)​ states with d>2d>2d>2 possess intrinsic many-body imaginarity: their complex phase structure cannot be removed by finite-depth local unitaries. Remarkably, this includes states that are not many-body chiral.