20 research outputs found
Topological Crystalline Bose Insulator in Two Dimensions via Entanglement Spectrum
Strongly correlated analogues of topological insulators have been explored in
systems with purely on-site symmetries, such as time-reversal or charge
conservation. Here, we use recently developed tensor network tools to study a
quantum state of interacting bosons which is featureless in the bulk, but
distinguished from an atomic insulator in that it exhibits entanglement which
is protected by its spatial symmetries. These properties are encoded in a model
many-body wavefunction that describes a fully symmetric insulator of bosons on
the honeycomb lattice at half filling per site. While the resulting integer
unit cell filling allows the state to bypass `no-go' theorems that trigger
fractionalization at fractional filling, it nevertheless has nontrivial
entanglement, protected by symmetry. We demonstrate this by computing the
boundary entanglement spectra, finding a gapless entanglement edge described by
a conformal field theory as well as degeneracies protected by the non-trivial
action of combined charge-conservation and spatial symmetries on the edge.
Here, the tight-binding representation of the space group symmetries plays a
particular role in allowing certain entanglement cuts that are not allowed on
other lattices of the same symmetry, suggesting that the lattice representation
can serve as an additional symmetry ingredient in protecting an interacting
topological phase. Our results extend to a related insulating state of
electrons, with short-ranged entanglement and no band insulator analogue.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures Added additional reference
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Tensor Network Wavefunctions for Topological Phases
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
Ising Anyons in Frustration-Free Majorana-Dimer Models
Dimer models have long been a fruitful playground for understanding
topological physics. Here we introduce a new class - termed Majorana-dimer
models - wherein bosonic dimers are decorated with pairs of Majorana modes. We
find that the simplest examples of such systems realize an intriguing,
intrinsically fermionic phase of matter that can be viewed as the product of a
chiral Ising theory, which hosts deconfined non-Abelian quasiparticles, and a
topological superconductor. While the bulk anyons are described by
a single copy of the Ising theory, the edge remains fully gapped. Consequently,
this phase can arise in exactly solvable, frustration-free models. We describe
two parent Hamiltonians: one generalizes the well-known dimer model on the
triangular lattice, while the other is most naturally understood as a model of
decorated fluctuating loops on a honeycomb lattice. Using modular
transformations, we show that the ground-state manifold of the latter model
unambiguously exhibits all properties of the
theory. We also discuss generalizations with more than one Majorana mode per
site, which realize phases related to Kitaev's 16-fold way in a similar
fashion