The tensor product representation of quantum states leads to a promising variational approach to study quantum phase and quantum phase transitions, especially topological ordered phases which are impossible to handle with conventional methods due to their long-range entanglement. However, an important issue arises when we use tensor product states (TPSs) as variational states to find the ground state of a Hamiltonian: can arbitrary variations in the tensors that represent ground state of a Hamiltonian be induced by local perturbations to the Hamiltonian? Starting from a tensor product state which is the exact ground state of a Hamiltonian with Z[subscript 2] topological order, we show that, surprisingly, not all variations in the tensors correspond to the variation in the ground state caused by local perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Even in the absence of any symmetry requirement of the perturbed Hamiltonian, one necessary condition for the variations in the tensors to be physical is that they respect certain Z[subscript 2] symmetry. We support this claim by calculating explicitly the change in topological entanglement entropy with different variations in the tensors. This finding will provide important guidance to numerical variational study of topological phase and phase transitions. It is also a crucial step in using TPS to study universal properties of a quantum phase and its topological order.
The tensor product representation of quantum states leads to a promising variational approach to study quantum phase and quantum phase transitions, especially topological ordered phases which are impossible to handle with conventional methods due to their long-range entanglement. However, an important issue arises when we use tensor product states (TPSs) as variational states to find the ground state of a Hamiltonian: can arbitrary variations in the tensors that represent ground state of a Hamiltonian be induced by local perturbations to the Hamiltonian? Starting from a tensor product state which is the exact ground state of a Hamiltonian with Z[subscript 2] topological order, we show that, surprisingly, not all variations in the tensors correspond to the variation in the ground state caused by local perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Even in the absence of any symmetry requirement of the perturbed Hamiltonian, one necessary condition for the variations in the tensors to be physical is that they respect certain Z[subscript 2] symmetry. We support this claim by calculating explicitly the change in topological entanglement entropy with different variations in the tensors. This finding will provide important guidance to numerical variational study of topological phase and phase transitions. It is also a crucial step in using TPS to study universal properties of a quantum phase and its topological order.
The tensor product representation of quantum states leads to a promising variational approach to study quantum phase and quantum phase transitions, especially topological ordered phases which are impossible to handle with conventional methods due to their long-range entanglement. However, an important issue arises when we use tensor product states (TPSs) as variational states to find the ground state of a Hamiltonian: can arbitrary variations in the tensors that represent ground state of a Hamiltonian be induced by local perturbations to the Hamiltonian? Starting from a tensor product state which is the exact ground state of a Hamiltonian with Z2 topological order, we show that, surprisingly, not all variations in the tensors correspond to the variation in the ground state caused by local perturbations of the Hamiltonian. Even in the absence of any symmetry requirement of the perturbed Hamiltonian, one necessary condition for the variations in the tensors to be physical is that they respect certain Z2 symmetry. We support this claim by calculating explicitly the change in topological entanglement entropy with different variations in the tensors. This finding will provide important guidance to numerical variational study of topological phase and phase transitions. It is also a crucial step in using TPS to study universal properties of a quantum phase and its topological order.
We show that general string-net condensed states have a natural representation in terms of tensor product states (TPSs). These TPSs are built from local tensors. They can describe both states with short-range entanglement (such as the symmetry-breaking states) and states with long-range entanglement (such as string-net condensed states with topological/quantum order). The tensor product representation provides a kind of ``mean-field'' description for topologically ordered states and could be a powerful way to study quantum phase transitions between such states. As an attempt in this direction, we show that the constructed TPSs are fixed points under a certain wave-function renormalization-group transformation for quantum states.
The tensor network representation of many-body quantum states, given by local tensors, provides a promising numerical tool for the study of strongly correlated topological phases in two dimensions. However, the representation may be vulnerable to instabilities caused by small variations in the local tensors. For example, the topological order in the tensor network representations of the toric code ground state has been shown in Chen, Zeng, Gu, Chuang, and Wen, Phys. Rev. B 82, 165119 (2010) to be unstable if the variations break certain Z2 symmetry of the tensor. In this work, we ask whether other types of topological orders suffer from similar kinds of instability and if so, what is the underlying physical mechanism and whether we can protect the order by enforcing certain symmetries on the tensor. We answer these questions by showing that the tensor network representations of all string-net models are indeed unstable, but the matrix product operator (MPO) symmetries of the tensors identified in \ifmmode \mbox{\c{S}}\else \c{S}\fi{}ahino\ifmmode \breve{g}\else \u{g}\fi{}lu, Williamson, Bultinck, Mari\"en, Haegeman, Schuch, and Verstraete, arXiv:1409.2150 can help to protect the order. In particular, we show that a subset of variations that break the MPO symmetries lead to instability by inducing the condensation of bosonic quasiparticles, which destroys the topological order in the wave function. Therefore such variations must be forbidden for the encoded topological order to be reliably extracted from the local tensors. On the other hand, if a tensor network based variational algorithm is used to simulate the phase transition due to boson condensation, such variation directions may prove important to access the continuous transition correctly.
Abstract One of the most striking features of gapped quantum phases that exhibit topological order is the presence of long-range entanglement that cannot be detected by any local order parameter. The formalism of projected entangled-pair states is a natural framework for the parameterization of gapped ground state wavefunctions which allows one to characterize topological order in terms of the virtual symmetries of the local tensors that encode the wavefunction. In their most general form, these symmetries are represented by matrix product operators acting on the virtual level, which leads to a set of algebraic rules characterizing states with topological quantum order. This construction generalizes the concepts of G G - and twisted injectivity; the corresponding matrix product operators encode all topological features of the theory and provide a complete picture of the ground state manifold on the torus. We show how the string-net models of Levin and Wen fit within this formalism and in doing so provide a particularly intuitive interpretation of the pentagon equation for F-symbols as the pulling of matrix product operators through the string-net tensor network. Our approach paves the way to finding novel topological phases beyond string nets and elucidates the description of topological phases in terms of entanglement Hamiltonians and edge theories.
Understanding many-body quantum systems is one of the most challenging problems in contemporary condensed-matter physics. Tensor network representation of quantum states and operators are taking central stage in this pursuit and beyond. They prove to be a powerful numerical and conceptual tool, and indeed a new language altogether. This thesis investigates various aspects of these representations by focusing on two specific problems: the first half of the thesis is devoted to examining how 'stable' a tensor network representation is for two-dimensional quantum states with topological order, and the second half explores the representability of various unitary loop operators with tensor networks. In the numerical usage of the tensor networks, the tensor is varied as to find the representation of the ground states of the given Hamiltonian. In chapter two and three of this thesis we show that such a numerical program for topological phases can be 'ill-posed'. We show that tensor network can be an unstable representation for a topological phase: even an infinitesimal variation in the representation results in the loss of topological order, completely or partially. We diagnose this problem by identifying the exact causes of this instability, and find that it is only tensor variations in certain directions that result in instability, because they result in the condensation of bosonic quasi-particles of the phase. Such unstable variations are characterized by two properties: (1) they can replace a tensor in the tensor network without making the network collapse, and (2) their presence in the network represents the presence of a non-trivial topological charge. We prove that the general tensor representation of all string-net models suffer with such instabilities. We propose an exact mathematical operator to project out all such unstable variations and show its efficacy for a few models by direct calculations. Such an operator can be useful in numerical programs involving such tensor representations. We also point out that such variations play a crucial role in simulating topological phase transitions and their presence can be vital in an accurate simulation. In chapter four and five of this thesis we focus on the representability of unitary loop operators by tensor networks. Such operators not only provide an important tool in the study of dynamical process in one-dimensional systems, but also in understanding and classification of symmetry protected topological phases in two dimensions. To characterize all such operators, we find a necessary and sufficient condition for any loop tensor network operator of a given length to represent a unitary operator. In particular, it is shown that all unitary operators that map local operators to local operators (locality-preserving) can always be represented by a tensor network. Locality-preserving unitary loop operators are classified by a rational index called the GNVW index defined in Ref. [1] which measures how much information 'flows' along the loop. We define Rank-Ratio index for tensor network operators and show that it is completely equivalent to the GNVW index. Therefore, GNVW index of a unitary operator can be easily extracted from its tensor network representation. We find that, other than representing locality-preserving unitary maps, tensor networks can also represent unitary operators that map local operators to global (non-local) operators. These tensor network operators are found to have a long-ranged order similar to tensors that represent topological tensor network states in two dimensions.
The combination of quantum effects and interactions in quantum many-body systems can result in exotic phases with fundamentally entangled ground state wavefunctions -- topological phases. Topological phases come in two types, both of which will be studied in this thesis. In topologically ordered phases, the pattern of entanglement in the ground state wavefunction encodes the statistics of exotic emergent excitations, a universal indicator of a phase that is robust to all types of perturbations. In symmetry protected topological phases, the entanglement instead encodes a universal response of the system to symmetry defects, an indicator that is robust only to perturbations respecting the protecting symmetry.Finding and creating these phases in physical systems is a motivating challenge that tests all aspects - analytical, numerical, and experimental - of our understanding of the quantum many-body problem. Nearly three decades ago, the creation of simple ansatz wavefunctions - such as the Laughlin fractional quantum hall state, the AKLT state, and the resonating valence bond state - spurred analytical understanding of both the role of entanglement in topological physics and physical mechanisms by which it can arise. However, quantitative understanding of the relevant phase diagrams is still challenging. For this purpose, tensor networks provide a toolbox for systematically improving wavefunction ansatz while still capturing the relevant entanglement properties.In this thesis, we use the tools of entanglement and tensor networks to analyze ansatz states for several proposed new phases. In the first part, we study a featureless phase of bosons on the honeycomb lattice and argue that this phase can be topologically protected under any one of several distinct subsets of the crystalline lattice symmetries. We discuss methods of detecting such phases with entanglement and without.In the second part, we consider the problem of constructing fixed-point wavefunctions for intrinsically fermionic topological phases, i.e. topological phases contructed out of fermions with a nontrivial response to fermion parity defects. A zero correlation length wavefunction and a commuting projector Hamiltonian that realizes this wavefunction as its ground state are constructed. Using an appropriate generalization of the minimally entangled states method for extraction of topological order from the ground states on a torus to the intrinsically fermionic case, we fully characterize the corresponding topological order as Ising x (p - i p). We argue that this phase can be captured using fermionic tensor networks, expanding the applicability of tensor network methods.