The present state of the gauge theory of high-temperature superconductivity in strongly-correlated two-dimensional spin systems is reviewed. Basic ideas on the statistics of elementary excitations in spatially two-dimensional systems are presented and are used in an analysis of the structure of the energy spectrum and the form of the wave function of a set of anyon quasiparticles in both the long-wave continuous and lattice limits. The continuous and lattice theories are used to classify the phase states, and the hierarchy of phase transitions is described in terms of the topological quantum field theory. Thermodynamic and electrodynamic properties of anyon systems are described, and the experimental consequences of the Chern–Simons theory of high-Tc superconductivity are discussed.
Decoherence-induced phase transitions (DIPTs) are associated with singular changes in a quantum system's entanglement structure as the decoherence strength varies. In many cases, their critical strengths depend monotonically on the Rényi index of the entanglement diagnostic, forming a Rényi hierarchy. We identify a general mechanism for this hierarchy based on correlation inequalities in replicated statistical models that describe these DIPTs. We demonstrate it in
Z2 topological stabilizer codes subject to independent phase-flip decoherence on each qubit and in a decohered rotor model with strong
U(1) symmetry. When the relevant correlations diagnose the DIPTs, these inequalities imply that the critical decoherence strength is nondecreasing with integer Rényi index
R≥2. We show that this mechanism also applies to a class of models with correlated decoherence.
We study the many-body physics of different quantum systems using a hierarchy of correlations, which corresponds to a generalization of the
1/Z hierarchy. The decoupling scheme obtained from this hierarchy is adapted to calculate double-time Green's functions and due to its nonperturbative nature, we describe quantum phase transition and topological features characteristic of strongly correlated phases. As concrete examples we consider spinless fermions in a dimerized chain and in a honeycomb lattice. We present analytical results which are valid for any dimension and can be generalized to different types of interactions (e.g., long-range interactions), which allows us to shed light on the effect of quantum correlations in a very systematic way. Furthermore, we show that this approach provides an efficient framework for the calculation of topological invariants in interacting systems.