Genuine Multi-Entropy in the Toric Code

Abstract

We study genuine multi-entropy as a diagnostic of multipartite entanglement in the toric code, which provides a controlled setting for probing multipartite structures in topologically ordered states. Our main question is whether genuine multi-entropy captures information that is not reducible to conventional lower-party entropic data, such as topological entanglement entropy. We first analyze toric-code ground states that admit a stabilizer-state description, where the relevant quantities can be evaluated exactly. We conjecture that, for stabilizer states and $\mathtt{q}\ge4$, the $\mathtt{q}$-partite genuine multi-entropy at replica index $n<\mathtt{q}$ collapses to a linear combination of multi-entropies involving at most $\mathtt{q}-2$ parties. We establish this pattern explicitly for $\mathtt{q}=4$ in the toric code stabilizer sector: for $n=2,3$, the genuine multi-entropy is proportional to the tripartite information $I_3$ and, for the Kitaev-Preskill partition, contains no independent genuine four-partite information beyond that captured by the topological entanglement entropy. At $n=4$, however, this reduction breaks down: the genuine multi-entropy is no longer proportional to $I_3$, but remains a topological invariant of the toric-code stabilizer ground states under Kitaev-Preskill-preserving deformations that do not change whether the numbers of vertex- and plaquette-type junctions coincide. For generic non-stabilizer superpositions within the ground-state manifold and for coherent superpositions of local excitations, the low-$n$ reduction also fails. These results show that genuine multi-entropy probes multipartite entanglement structure beyond the tripartite information, and hence beyond the topological entanglement entropy in the Kitaev-Preskill partition, whereas for stabilizer states at low replica index it reduces to lower-partite entropic data.