Michaël Mariën

Entanglement rates and area laws.

We prove an upper bound on the maximal rate at which a Hamiltonian interaction can generate entanglement in a bipartite system. The scaling of this bound as a function of the subsystem dimension on which the Hamiltonian acts nontrivially is optimal and is exponentially improved over previously known bounds. As an application, we show that a gapped quantum many-body spin system on an arbitrary lattice satisfies an area law for the entanglement entropy if and only if any other state with which it is adiabatically connected (i.e., any state in the same phase) also satisfies an area law.

Entanglement of Distillation for Lattice Gauge Theories

We study the entanglement structure of lattice gauge theories from the local operational point of view, and, similar to Soni and Trivedi [J. High Energy Phys. 1 (2016) 1], we show that the usual entanglement entropy for a spatial bipartition can be written as the sum of an undistillable gauge part and of another part corresponding to the local operations and classical communication distillable entanglement, which is obtained by depolarizing the local superselection sectors. We demonstrate that the distillable entanglement is zero for pure Abelian gauge theories at zero gauge coupling, while it is in general nonzero for the non-Abelian case. We also consider gauge theories with matter, and show in a perturbative approach how area laws-including a topological correction-emerge for the distillable entanglement. Finally, we also discuss the entanglement entropy of gauge fixed states and show that it has no relation to the physical distillable entropy.

Geometry of matrix product states: Metric, parallel transport, and curvature

We study the geometric properties of the manifold of states described as (uniform) matrix product states. Due to the parameter redundancy in the matrix product state representation, matrix product states have the mathematical structure of a (principal) fiber bundle. The total space or bundle space corresponds to the parameter space, i.e., the space of tensors associated to every physical site. The base manifold is embedded in Hilbert space and can be given the structure of a Kahler manifold by inducing the Hilbert space metric. Our main interest is in the states living in the tangent space to the base manifold, which have recently been shown to be interesting in relation to time dependence and elementary excitations. By lifting these tangent vectors to the (tangent space) of the bundle space using a well-chosen prescription (a principal bundle connection), we can define and efficiently compute an inverse metric, and introduce differential geometric concepts such as parallel transport (related to the Levi-Civita connection) and the Riemann curvature tensor.

Anyons and matrix product operator algebras

Quantum tensor network states and more particularly projected entangled-pair states provide a natural framework for representing ground states of gapped, topologically ordered systems. The defining feature of these representations is that topological order is a consequence of the symmetry of the underlying tensors in terms of matrix product operators. In this paper, we present a systematic study of those matrix product operators, and show how this relates entanglement properties of projected entangled-pair states to the formalism of fusion tensor categories. From the matrix product operators we construct a C*-algebra and find that topological sectors can be identified with the central idempotents of this algebra. This allows us to construct projected entangled-pair states containing an arbitrary number of anyons. Properties such as topological spin, the S matrix, fusion and braiding relations can readily be extracted from the idempotents. As the matrix product operator symmetries are acting purely on the virtual level of the tensor network, the ensuing Wilson loops are not fattened when perturbing the system, and this opens up the possibility of simulating topological theories away from renormalization group fixed points. We illustrate the general formalism for the special cases of discrete gauge theories and string-net models.

Renormalization Group Flows of Hamiltonians Using Tensor Networks

A renormalization group flow of Hamiltonians for two-dimensional classical partition functions is constructed using tensor networks. Similar to tensor network renormalization [G. Evenbly and G. Vidal, Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 180405 (2015)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.115.180405; S. Yang, Z.-C. Gu, and X.-G. Wen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 118, 110504 (2017)PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.118.110504], we obtain approximate fixed point tensor networks at criticality. Our formalism, however, preserves positivity of the tensors at every step and hence yields an interpretation in terms of Hamiltonian flows. We emphasize that the key difference between tensor network approaches and Kadanoffs spin blocking method can be understood in terms of a change of the local basis at every decimation step, a property which is crucial to overcome the area law of mutual information. We derive algebraic relations for fixed point tensors, calculate critical exponents, and benchmark our method on the Ising model and the six-vertex model.

Entanglement Rates and the Stability of the Area Law for the Entanglement Entropy

We prove a conjecture by Bravyi on an upper bound on entanglement rates of local Hamiltonians. We then use this bound to prove the stability of the area law for the entanglement entropy of quantum spin systems under adiabatic and quasi-adiabatic evolutions.

Matrix product operators for symmetry-protected topological phases: Gauging and edge theories

Projected entangled pair states (PEPS) provide a natural description of the ground states of gapped, local Hamiltonians in which global characteristics of a quantum state are encoded in properties of local tensors. We show that on-site symmetries, as occurring in systems exhibiting symmetry-protected topological (SPT) quantum order, can be captured by a virtual symmetry of the tensors expressed as a set of matrix product operators labelled by the different group elements. A classification of SPT phases can hence be obtained by studying the topological obstructions to continuously deforming one set of matrix product operators into another. This leads to the classification of bosonic SPT states in terms of group cohomology, as originally derived by Chen et al. in [1106.4772]. Our formalism accommodates perturbations away from fixed point models, and hence opens up the possibility of studying phase transitions between different SPT phases. We furthermore show how the global symmetries of SPT PEPS can be promoted into a set of local gauge constraints by introducing bosonic degrees of freedom on the links of the PEPS lattice, thereby providing a natural and general mapping between PEPS in SPT phases and topologically ordered phases.

Excitations and the tangent space of projected entangled-pair states

We develop tangent space methods for projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) that provide direct access to the low-energy sector of strongly-correlated two-dimensional quantum systems. More specifically, we construct a variational ansatz for elementary excitations on top of PEPS ground states that allows for computing gaps, dispersion relations, and spectral weights directly in the thermodynamic limit. Solving the corresponding variational problem requires the evaluation of momentum transformed two-point and three-point correlation functions on a PEPS background, which we can compute efficiently by using a contraction scheme. As an application we study the spectral properties of the magnons of the Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki model on the square lattice and the anyonic excitations in a perturbed version of Kitaevs toric code.

Condensation-driven phase transitions in perturbed string nets

We develop methods to probe the excitation spectrum of topological phases of matter in two spatial dimensions. Applying these to the Fibonacci string nets perturbed away from exact solvability, we analyze a topological phase transition driven by the condensation of non-Abelian anyons. Our numerical results illustrate how such phase transitions involve the spontaneous breaking of a topological symmetry, generalizing the traditional Landau paradigm. The main technical tool is the characterization of the ground states using tensor networks and the topological properties using matrix-product-operator symmetries. The topological phase transition manifests itself by symmetry breaking in the entanglement degrees of freedom of the quantum transfer matrix.

Bridging Perturbative Expansions with Tensor Networks

We demonstrate that perturbative expansions for quantum many-body systems can be rephrased in terms of tensor networks, thereby providing a natural framework for interpolating perturbative expansions across a quantum phase transition. This approach leads to classes of tensor-network states parametrized by few parameters with a clear physical meaning, while still providing excellent variational energies. We also demonstrate how to construct perturbative expansions of the entanglement Hamiltonian, whose eigenvalues form the entanglement spectrum, and how the tensor-network approach gives rise to order parameters for topological phase transitions.