Entanglement entropy of (3+1)D topological orders with excitations

ORAL

Abstract

Excitations in (3+1)D topologically ordered phases have very rich structures. (3+1)D topological phases support both point-like and string-like excitations, and in particular the loop (closed string) excitations may admit knotted and linked structures. In this work, we ask the question how different types of topological excitations contribute to the entanglement entropy, or alternatively, can we use the entanglement entropy to detect the structure of excitations, and further obtain the information of the underlying topological orders? We are mainly interested in (3+1)D topological orders that can be realized in Dijkgraaf-Witten gauge theories, which are labeled by a finite group $G$ and its group 4-cocycle $\omega\in\mathcal{H}^4[G;U(1)]$ up to group automorphisms. We find that each topological excitation contributes a universal constant $\log d_i$ to the entanglement entropy, where $d_i$ is the quantum dimension that depends on both the structure of the excitation and the data $(G,\,\omega)$. The entanglement entropy of the excitations of the linked/unlinked topology can capture different information of the DW theory $(G,\,\omega)$. In particular, the entanglement entropy introduced by Hopf-link loop excitations can distinguish certain group 4-cocycles $\omega$ from the others.

Presenters

  • Xueda Wen

    Physics, MIT

Authors

  • Xueda Wen

    Physics, MIT

  • Huan He

    Physics Department, Princeton Univ, Physics, Princeton University, Princeton University

  • Apoorv Tiwari

    Univ of Illinois - Urbana, Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

  • Yunqin Zheng

    Physics Department, Princeton Univ, Physics, Princeton University, Princeton University

  • Peng Ye

    University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Princeton University