Frank Pollmann

Unbounded growth of entanglement in models of many-body localization.

An important and incompletely answered question is whether a closed quantum system of many interacting particles can be localized by disorder. The time evolution of simple (unentangled) initial states is studied numerically for a system of interacting spinless fermions in one dimension described by the random-field XXZ Hamiltonian. Interactions induce a dramatic change in the propagation of entanglement and a smaller change in the propagation of particles. For even weak interactions, when the system is thought to be in a many-body localized phase, entanglement shows neither localized nor diffusive behavior but grows without limit in an infinite system: interactions act as a singular perturbation on the localized state with no interactions. The significance for proposed atomic experiments is that local measurements will show a large but nonthermal entropy in the many-body localized state. This entropy develops slowly (approximately logarithmically) over a diverging time scale as in glassy systems.

Symmetry protection of topological phases in one-dimensional quantum spin systems

We discuss the characterization and stability of the Haldane phase in integer spin chains on the basis of simple, physical arguments. We find that an odd-S Haldane phase is a topologically nontrivial phase which is protected by any one of the following three global symmetries: (i) the dihedral group of π rotations about the x, y, and z axes, (ii) time-reversal symmetry Sx,y,z→−Sx,y,z, and (iii) link inversion symmetry (reflection about a bond center), consistent with previous results [ Phys. Rev. B 81 064439 (2010)]. On the other hand, an even-S Haldane phase is not topologically protected (i.e., it is indistinct from a trivial, site-factorizable phase). We show some numerical evidence that supports these claims, using concrete examples.

Topological Phases of One-Dimensional Fermions: An Entanglement Point of View

The effect of interactions on topological insulators and superconductors remains, to a large extent, an open problem. Here, we describe a framework for classifying phases of one-dimensional interacting fermions, focusing on spinless fermions with time-reversal symmetry and particle number parity conservation, using concepts of entanglement. In agreement with an example presented by L. Fidkowski and A. Kitaev [Phys. Rev. B 81, 134509 (2010)], we find that in the presence of interactions there are only eight distinct phases which obey a

Topological characterization of fractional quantum Hall ground states from microscopic Hamiltonians.

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Detection of symmetry-protected topological phases in one dimension

group structure. This is in contrast to the

Obtaining Highly Excited Eigenstates of Many-Body Localized Hamiltonians by the Density Matrix Renormalization Group Approach.

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Efficient variational diagonalization of fully many-body localized Hamiltonians

classification in the noninteracting case. Each of these eight phases is characterized by a unique set of bulk invariants, related to the transformation laws of its entanglement (Schmidt) eigenstates under symmetry operations, and has a characteristic degeneracy of its entanglement levels. If translational symmetry is present, the number of distinct phases increases to 16.

Infinite density matrix renormalization group for multicomponent quantum Hall systems

We show how to numerically calculate several quantities that characterize topological order starting from a microscopic fractional quantum Hall Hamiltonian. To find the set of degenerate ground states, we employ the infinite density matrix renormalization group method based on the matrix-product state representation of fractional quantum Hall states on an infinite cylinder. To study localized quasiparticles of a chosen topological charge, we use pairs of degenerate ground states as boundary conditions for the infinite density matrix renormalization group. We then show that the wave function obtained on the infinite cylinder geometry can be adapted to a torus of arbitrary modular parameter, which allows us to explicitly calculate the non-Abelian Berry connection associated with the modular T transformation. As a result, the quantum dimensions, topological spins, quasiparticle charges, chiral central charge, and Hall viscosity of the phase can be obtained using data contained entirely in the entanglement spectrum of an infinite cylinder.

Phase diagram of the anisotropic spin-2 XXZ model: Infinite-system density matrix renormalization group study

A topological phase is a phase of matter which cannot be characterized by a local order parameter. It has been shown that gapped symmetric phases in one-dimensional (1D) systems can be completely characterized using tools related to projective representations of the symmetry groups. We explain two ways to detect these symmetry protected topological phases in 1D. First, we give a numerical approach for directly extracting the projective representations from a matrix-product state representation. Second, we derive nonlocal order parameters for time-reversal and inversion symmetry, and discuss a generalized string order for local symmetries for which the regular string-order parameter cannot be applied. We furthermore point out that the nonlocal order parameter for these topological phases is actually related to topological surfaces.

Signatures of Dirac cones in a DMRG study of the Kagome Heisenberg model

The eigenstates of many-body localized (MBL) Hamiltonians exhibit low entanglement. We adapt the highly successful density-matrix renormalization group method, which is usually used to find modestly entangled ground states of local Hamiltonians, to find individual highly excited eigenstates of MBL Hamiltonians. The adaptation builds on the distinctive spatial structure of such eigenstates. We benchmark our method against the well-studied random field Heisenberg model in one dimension. At moderate to large disorder, the method successfully obtains excited eigenstates with high accuracy, thereby enabling a study of MBL systems at much larger system sizes than those accessible to exact-diagonalization methods.