We investigate the relations between the bulk and boundaries properties of short-range resonating valence bond wave functions using Projected Entangled Pair States. We find a gapless (gapped) entanglement spectrum for kagome (square) lattices, which reflects the properties of the edge modes rather than those of the bulk correlations. We also derive the topological entropy and show that the topological nature of the wave function manifests itself in a non-local many-body boundary Hamiltonian which we identify completely. We propose to use this feature as a probe to identify topological phases in microscopic Hamiltonians.
We investigate the relations between the bulk and boundaries properties of short-range resonating valence bond wave functions using Projected Entangled Pair States. We find a gapless (gapped) entanglement spectrum for kagome (square) lattices, which reflects the properties of the edge modes rather than those of the bulk correlations. We also derive the topological entropy and show that the topological nature of the wave function manifests itself in a non-local many-body boundary Hamiltonian which we identify completely. We propose to use this feature as a probe to identify topological phases in microscopic Hamiltonians.
We examine in details the connections between topological and entanglement properties of short-range resonating valence bond (RVB) wave functions using projected entangled pair states (PEPS) on kagome and square lattices on (quasi)infinite cylinders with generalized boundary conditions (and perimeters with up to 20 lattice spacings). By making use of disconnected topological sectors in the space of dimer lattice coverings, we explicitly derive (orthogonal) ``minimally entangled'' PEPS RVB states. For the kagome lattice, using the quantum Heisenberg antiferromagnet as a reference model, we obtain the finite-size scaling with increasing cylinder perimeter of the vanishing energy separations between these states. In particular, we extract two separate (vanishing) energy scales corresponding (i) to insert a vison line between the two ends of the cylinder and (ii) to pull out and freeze a spin at either end. We also investigate the relations between bulk and boundary properties and show that, for a bipartition of the cylinder, the boundary Hamiltonian defined on the edge can be written as a product of a highly nonlocal projector, which fundamentally depends upon boundary conditions, with an emergent (local) SU(2)-invariant one-dimensional (superfluid) t-J Hamiltonian, which arises due to the symmetry properties of the auxiliary spins at the edge. This multiplicative structure, a consequence of the disconnected topological sectors in the space of dimer lattice coverings, is characteristic of the topological nature of the states. For minimally entangled RVB states, it is shown that the entanglement spectrum, which reflects the properties of the (gapless or gapped) edge modes, is a subset of the spectrum of the local Hamiltonian, e.g., half of it for the kagome RVB state, providing a simple argument on the origin of the topological entanglement entropy ${S}_{0}=\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{ln}2$ of the Z2 spin liquid. We propose to use these features to probe topological phases in microscopic Hamiltonians, and some results are compared to existing density matrix renormalization group data.
We study the structure of topological phases and their boundaries in the projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) formalism. We show how topological order in a system can be identified from the structure of the PEPS transfer operator and subsequently use these findings to analyze the structure of the boundary Hamiltonian, acting on the bond variables, which reflects the entanglement properties of the system. We find that in a topological phase, the boundary Hamiltonian consists of two parts: A universal nonlocal part which encodes the nature of the topological phase and a nonuniversal part which is local and inherits the symmetries of the topological model, which helps to infer the structure of the boundary Hamiltonian and thus possibly of the physical edge modes.
In many physical scenarios, close relations between the bulk properties of quantum systems and theories associated with their boundaries have been observed. In this work, we provide an exact duality mapping between the bulk of a quantum spin system and its boundary using projected entangled-pair states. This duality associates to every region a Hamiltonian on its boundary, in such a way that the entanglement spectrum of the bulk corresponds to the excitation spectrum of the boundary Hamiltonian. We study various specific models: a deformed AKLT model [I. Affleck, T. Kennedy, E. H. Lieb, and H. Tasaki, Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 799 (1987)], an Ising-type model [F. Verstraete, M. M. Wolf, D. Perez-Garcia, and J. I. Cirac, Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 220601 (2006)], and Kitaev's toric code [A. Kitaev, Ann. Phys. 303, 2 (2003)], both in finite ladders and in infinite square lattices. In the second case, some of those models display quantum phase transitions. We find that a gapped bulk phase with local order corresponds to a boundary Hamiltonian with local interactions, whereas critical behavior in the bulk is reflected on a diverging interaction length of the boundary Hamiltonian. Furthermore, topologically ordered states yield nonlocal Hamiltonians. Because our duality also associates a boundary operator to any operator in the bulk, it in fact provides a full holographic framework for the study of quantum many-body systems via their boundary.
We study a short-range resonating valence bond (RVB) wave function with diagonal links on the square lattice that permits sign-problem free wave function Monte Carlo studies. Special attention is given to entanglement properties, in particular, the study of minimum entropy states (MES) according to the method of Zhang et al. [Phys. Rev. B 85, 235151 (2012)]. We provide evidence that the MES associated with the RVB wave functions can be lifted from an associated quantum dimer picture of these wave functions, where MES states are certain linear combinations of eigenstates of a 't Hooft ``magnetic loop''-type operator. From this identification, we calculate a value consistent with ln(2) for the topological entanglement entropy directly for the RVB states via wave function Monte Carlo. This corroborates the Z2 nature of the RVB states. We furthermore define and elaborate on the concept of a ``pre-Kasteleyn'' orientation that may be useful for the study of lattices with nonplanar topology in general.
Quantum entanglement marks a definitive feature of topological states. However, the entanglement spectrum remains insufficiently explored for topological states without a bulk energy gap. Using a combination of field theory and numerical techniques, we accurately calculate and analyze the entanglement spectrum of gapless symmetry protected topological states in one dimension. We highlight that the universal entanglement spectrum not only encodes the nontrivial edge degeneracy, generalizing the Li-Haldane conjecture to gapless topological states, but also contains the operator content of the underlying boundary conformal field theory. This implies that the bulk wave function can act as a fingerprint of both quantum criticality and topology in gapless symmetry protected topological states. We also identify a symmetry enriched conformal boundary condition that goes beyond the conventional conformal boundary condition.
Phases of gapped quantum liquids are topologically ordered and have very interesting physical features that are completely robust against any local perturbation that do not close the bulk energy gap. These universal properties are hidden in the ground states of these systems, as different patterns of many-body long-range entanglement. In this thesis we study the universal properties of gapped quantum liquids from various perspectives. We propose the notion of Universal Wavefunction Overlap as a way of extracting almost complete information about the underlying entanglement structure in a system with topological order. We propose an efficient numerical methods to use these universal wavefunction overlaps as topological order parameters and demonstrate their usefulness with concrete numerical computations. In 2 + 1D these overlaps correspond to known quantities and contain information about anyonic particle excitations. We show that in 3 + 1D, these overlaps contain information about linked multi-string braiding processes, in particular three-string braiding. \n \nIn the second part of this thesis, we study boundary physics of systems with topological order. We investigate the correspondence between edge and entanglement spectra for non-chiral topological systems in general and with the presence of extra symmetries and dualities. We also show that by local deformations of the fixed-point wavefunction on non- chiral topological orders, all possible edge theories can be extracted from its entanglement Hamiltonian. Finally we introduce the notion of fermionic gapped boundaries and see how the phase diagram of the simplest topological orders get significantly enriched.