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Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Unconventional topological mixed-state transition and critical phase induced by self-dual coherent errors

Yu-Hsueh Chen, Tarun Grover

Published Sep 26, 2024• 29 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Topologically ordered phases host anyons that can condense, leading to a trivial gapped phase. Such a transition can be induced by coupling to an environment. This paper explores a scenario where the coupling between a topologically ordered phase and the environment maintains a self-duality symmetry that interchanges anyons with nontrivial mutual statistics. The authors find that this duality symmetry prevents anyon condensation and, further, for a range of the coupling strength, the topological phase is destroyed in favor of an exotic critical phase.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.110.125152

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Topologically ordered phases host anyons that can condense, leading to a trivial gapped phase. Such a transition can be induced by coupling to an environment. This paper explores a scenario where the coupling between a topologically ordered phase and the environment maintains a self-duality symmetry that interchanges anyons with nontrivial mutual statistics. The authors find that this duality symmetry prevents anyon condensation and, further, for a range of the coupling strength, the topological phase is destroyed in favor of an exotic critical phase.
A topological phase can undergo a phase transition driven by anyon condensation. A potential obstruction to such a mechanism could arise if there exists a symmetry between anyons that have non-trivial mutual statistics. Here we consider toric code subjected to errors that tend to proliferate anyons with non-trivial mutual statistics. Using triangle inequality, we show that in the presence of electromagnetic duality and a partial-transpose symmetry, a decoherence induced phase transition out of the topological phase must be rather unconventional and lie beyond standard rules of anyon condensation. To explore such physics, we first subject toric code to a self-dual quantum channel where Kraus operators are proportional to X+Z. We find that the topological phase is stable up to the maximal error rate, when viewing density matrix as a pure state in the double Hilbert space. To access an unconventional transition, we then consider a perturbed toric code subjected to the self-dual channel, and find numerical evidence that beyond a critical error rate, the topological phase is destroyed resulting in a critical phase where anyons are only power-law condensed.
We investigate the effects of quenched randomness on topological quantum phase transitions in strongly interacting two-dimensional systems. We focus first on transitions driven by the condensation of a subset of fractionalized quasiparticles (``anyons'') identified with ``electric charge'' excitations of a phase with intrinsic topological order. All other anyons have nontrivial mutual statistics with the condensed subset and hence become confined at the anyon condensation transition. Using a combination of microscopically exact duality transformations and asymptotically exact real-space renormalization group techniques applied to these two-dimensional disordered gauge theories, we argue that the resulting critical scaling behavior is ``superuniversal'' across a wide range of such condensation transitions and is controlled by the same infinite-randomness fixed point as that of the 2D random transverse-field Ising model. We validate this claim using large-scale quantum Monte Carlo simulations that allow us to extract zero-temperature critical exponents and correlation functions in (2+1)D(2+1)\mathrm{D}(2+1)D disordered interacting systems. We discuss generalizations of these results to a large class of ground-state and excited-state topological transitions in systems with intrinsic topological order as well as those where topological order is either protected or enriched by global symmetries. When the underlying topological order and the symmetry group are Abelian, our results provide prototypes for topological phase transitions between distinct many-body localized phases.
Bose condensation is central to our understanding of quantum phases of matter. Here, we review Bose condensation in topologically ordered phases (also called topological symmetry breaking), where the condensing bosons have nontrivial mutual statistics with other quasiparticles in the system. We give a nontechnical overview of the relationship between the phases before and after condensation, drawing parallels with more familiar symmetry-breaking transitions. We then review two important applications of this phenomenon. First, we describe the equivalence between such condensation transitions and pairs of phases with gappable boundaries, as well as examples where multiple types of gapped boundary between the same two phases exist. Second, we discuss how such transitions can lead to global symmetries that exchange or permute anyon types. Finally, we discuss the nature of the critical point, which can be mapped to a conventional phase transition in some—but not all—cases.
Topological phases are exotic states of matters which do not order locally yet exhibit a global ordering in their entanglement, making their characterization a challenging task. In this work, the authors construct an explicit holographic duality between topological phases in the bulk and the structure of the entanglement spectrum at its boundary, thereby establishing a one-to-one correspondence between different bulk topological orders and symmetry-breaking and symmetry-protected orderings of the entanglement. This allows classification and detection of topological phases holographically through ``entanglement spectroscopy'' at the boundary, and construction of order parameters that measure the condensation and confinement of anyons, and thus permits characterization of the nature of topological phase transitions.
Topological quantum computation relies on braiding non-Abelian anyons, but requires the underlying topological order to survive imperfect state preparation and environmental noise. We show that the instability of topological order to wavefunction deformations and to decoherence, with the latter probed by syndrome distributions, is generically captured by stat-mech models whose G×Rep(G)G\times \textrm{Rep}(G)G×Rep(G) symmetry naturally exposes the corrupting anyonic excitations. As an example, we combine this framework with Monte-Carlo simulations to resolve the stability of D4D_4D4​ topological order under deformations and quantum channels that proliferate multiple non-Abelian anyon species that are individually unable to condense. We show that beyond a finite threshold, proliferation of two non-Abelian anyon species parasitically condenses a shared Abelian-anyon fusion outcome---destroying the topological order. Our symmetry-based approach suggests the resulting trivial phase is distinct from that obtained by condensing all Abelian anyons; in other words, the trivial phase "remembers" which anyons condensed. This framework provides a first step into identifying the relevant symmetry for optimal decoders, conditioned on syndrome measurements, of non-Abelian topological order.
Topological phases - systems with a global ordering in the entanglement - exhibit exotic excitations known as anyons which can display highly nontrivial (non-Abelian) statistics. Through transitions between such phases, these anyons can undergo rather surprising changes. Perhaps most surprisingly, one anyon can split into two or more anyons, some of which might condense or become confined. The authors propose here a complete set of order parameters which allow one to extract the full information about how the properties of anyons change through phase transitions, and to apply them to a range of topological phase transitions.