A theory of minimal updates in holography

Consider two quantum critical Hamiltonians $H$ and $\tilde{H}$ on a $d$-dimensional lattice that only differ in some region $\mathcal{R}$. We study the relation between holographic representations, obtained through real-space renormalization, of their corresponding ground states $\left.| \psi \right\rangle$ and $\left.| \tilde{\psi} \right\rangle$. We observe that, even though $\left.| \psi \right\rangle$ and $\left.| \tilde{\psi} \right\rangle$ disagree significantly both inside and outside region $\mathcal{R}$, they still admit holographic descriptions that only differ inside the past causal cone $\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{R})$ of region $\mathcal{R}$, where $\mathcal{C}(\mathcal{R})$ is obtained by coarse-graining region $\mathcal{R}$. We argue that this result follows from a notion of directed influence in the renormalization group flow that is closely connected to the success of Wilson's numerical renormalization group for impurity problems. At a practical level, directed influence allows us to exploit translation invariance when describing a homogeneous system with e.g. an impurity, in spite of the fact that the Hamiltonian is no longer invariant under translations.Comment: main text: 5 pages, 4 figures, appendices: 7 pages, 7 figures. Revised for greater clarit

Algorithms for entanglement renormalization: boundaries, impurities and interfaces

We propose algorithms, based on the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz, to obtain the ground state of quantum critical systems in the presence of boundaries, impurities, or interfaces. By exploiting the theory of minimal updates [G. Evenbly and G. Vidal, arXiv:1307.0831], the ground state is completely characterized in terms of a number of variational parameters that is independent of the system size, even though the presence of a boundary, an impurity, or an interface explicitly breaks the translation invariance of the host system. Similarly, computational costs do not scale with the system size, allowing the thermodynamic limit to be studied directly and thus avoiding finite size effects e.g. when extracting the universal properties of the critical system.Comment: 29 pages, 29 figure

Scaling of entanglement entropy in the (branching) multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz

We investigate the scaling of entanglement entropy in both the multi-scale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA) and in its generalization, the branching MERA. We provide analytical upper bounds for this scaling, which take the general form of a boundary law with various types of multiplicative corrections, including power-law corrections all the way to a bulk law. For several cases of interest, we also provide numerical results that indicate that these upper bounds are saturated to leading order. In particular we establish that, by a suitable choice of holographic tree, the branching MERA can reproduce the logarithmic multiplicative correction of the boundary law observed in Fermi liquids and spin-Bose metals in $D\geq 2$ dimensions.Comment: 17 pages, 14 figure