Boundary-locality and perturbative structure of entanglement spectra in gapped systems

Structure of the Hamiltonian of mean force

The Hamiltonian of mean force is an effective Hamiltonian that allows a quantum system, nonweakly coupled to an environment, to be written in an effective Gibbs state. We present results on the structure of the Hamiltonian of mean force in extended quantum systems with local interactions. We show that its spatial structure exhibits a "skin effect"-its difference from the system Hamiltonian dies off exponentially with distance from the system-environment boundary. For spin systems, we identify the terms that can appear in the Hamiltonian of mean force at different orders in the inverse temperature.

Digital quantum simulation of Floquet symmetry-protected topological phases

Quantum many-body systems away from equilibrium host a rich variety of exotic phenomena that are forbidden by equilibrium thermodynamics. A prominent example is that of discrete time crystals^1–8, in which time-translational symmetry is spontaneously broken in periodically driven systems. Pioneering experiments have observed signatures of time crystalline phases with trapped ions^9,10, solid-state spin systems^11–15, ultracold atoms^16,17 and superconducting qubits^18–20. Here we report the observation of a distinct type of non-equilibrium state of matter, Floquet symmetry-protected topological phases, which are implemented through digital quantum simulation with an array of programmable superconducting qubits. We observe robust long-lived temporal correlations and subharmonic temporal response for the edge spins over up to 40 driving cycles using a circuit of depth exceeding 240 and acting on 26 qubits. We demonstrate that the subharmonic response is independent of the initial state, and experimentally map out a phase boundary between the Floquet symmetry-protected topological and thermal phases. Our results establish a versatile digital simulation approach to exploring exotic non-equilibrium phases of matter with current noisy intermediate-scale quantum processors²¹.

Signatures of non-equilibrium Floquet SPT phases with a programmable superconducting quantum processor are observed in which the discrete time translational symmetry only breaks at the boundaries and not in the bulk.

Entanglement structure of the two-component Bose-Hubbard model as a quantum simulator of a Heisenberg chain

We consider a quantum simulator of the Heisenberg chain with ferromagnetic interactions based on the two-component 1D Bose-Hubbard model at filling equal to two in the strong coupling regime. The entanglement properties of the ground state of the two-component Bose-Hubbard model are compared to those of the effective spin model as the interspecies interaction approaches the intraspecies one. A numerical study of the entanglement properties of the two-component Bose-Hubbard model is supplemented with analytical expressions derived from the effective spin Hamiltonian. When the pure ferromagnetic Heisenberg chain is considered, the entanglement properties of the effective Hamiltonian are not properly predicted by the quantum simulator.

Power-Law Entanglement Spectrum in Many-Body Localized Phases

The entanglement spectrum of the reduced density matrix contains information beyond the von Neumann entropy and provides unique insights into exotic orders or critical behavior of quantum systems. Here, we show that strongly disordered systems in the many-body localized phase have power-law entanglement spectra, arising from the presence of extensively many local integrals of motion. The power-law entanglement spectrum distinguishes many-body localized systems from ergodic systems, as well as from ground states of gapped integrable models or free systems in the vicinity of scale-invariant critical points. We confirm our results using large-scale exact diagonalization. In addition, we develop a matrix-product state algorithm which allows us to access the eigenstates of large systems close to the localization transition, and discuss general implications of our results for variational studies of highly excited eigenstates in many-body localized systems.

Momentum-space entanglement spectrum of bosons and fermions with interactions

We study the momentum space entanglement spectra of bosonic and fermionic formulations of the spin-1/2 XXZ chain with analytical methods and exact diagonalization. We investigate the behavior of the entanglement gaps, present in both formulations, across quantum phase transitions in the XXZ chain. In both cases, finite size scaling suggests that the entanglement gap closure does not occur at the physical transition points. For bosons, we find that the entanglement gap observed in Thomale et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 116805 (2010)] depends on the scaling dimension of the conformal field theory as varied by the XXZ anisotropy. For fermions, the infinite entanglement gap present at the XX point persists well past the phase transition at the Heisenberg point. We elaborate on how these shifted transition points in the entanglement spectra may support the numerical study of phase transitions in the momentum space density matrix renormalization group.

Bulk entanglement spectrum reveals quantum criticality within a topological state

A quantum phase transition is usually achieved by tuning physical parameters in a Hamiltonian at zero temperature. Here, we show that the ground state of a topological phase itself encodes critical properties of its transition to a trivial phase. To extract this information, we introduce an extensive partition of the system into two subsystems both of which extend throughout the bulk in all directions. The resulting bulk entanglement spectrum has a low-lying part that resembles the excitation spectrum of a bulk Hamiltonian, which allows us to probe a topological phase transition from a single wave function by tuning either the geometry of the partition or the entanglement temperature. As an example, this remarkable correspondence between the topological phase transition and the entanglement criticality is rigorously established for integer quantum Hall states.

How universal is the entanglement spectrum?

It is now commonly believed that the ground state entanglement spectrum (ES) exhibits universal features characteristic of a given phase. In this Letter, we show that this belief is false in general. Most significantly, we show that the entanglement Hamiltonian can undergo quantum phase transitions in which its ground state and low-energy spectrum exhibit singular changes, even when the physical system remains in the same phase. For broken symmetry problems, this implies that the low-energy ES and the Rényi entropies can mislead entirely, while for quantum Hall systems, the ES has much less universal content than assumed to date.

Berry-phase-induced dimerization in one-dimensional quadrupolar systems

We investigate the effect of the Berry phase on quadrupoles that occur, for example, in the low-energy description of spin models. Specifically, we study here the one-dimensional bilinear-biquadratic spin-one model. An open question for many years about this model is whether it has a nondimerized fluctuating nematic phase. The dimerization has recently been proposed to be related to Berry phases of the quantum fluctuations. We use an effective low-energy description to calculate the scaling of the dimerization according to this theory and then verify the predictions using large scale density-matrix renormalization group simulations, giving good evidence that the state is dimerized all the way up to its transition into the ferromagnetic phase. We furthermore discuss the multiplet structure found in the entanglement spectrum of the ground state wave functions.

Entanglement spectrum of the two-dimensional Bose-Hubbard model

We study the entanglement spectrum (ES) of the Bose-Hubbard model on the two-dimensional square lattice at unit filling, both in the Mott insulating and in the superfluid phase. In the Mott phase, we demonstrate that the ES is dominated by the physics at the boundary between the two subsystems. On top of the boundary-local (perturbative) structure, the ES exhibits substructures arising from one-dimensional dispersions along the boundary. In the superfluid phase, the structure of the ES is qualitatively different, and reflects the spontaneously broken U(1) symmetry of the phase. We attribute the basic low-lying structure to the "tower of states" Hamiltonian of the model. We then discuss how these characteristic structures evolve across the superfluid to Mott insulator transition and their influence on the behavior of the entanglement entropies. We briefly outline the implications of the ES structure on the efficiency of matrix-product-state based algorithms in two dimensions.