English

Entanglement Entropy and Topological Order in Resonating Valence-Bond Quantum Spin Liquids

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2017-03-15 v3

Abstract

On the triangular and kagome lattices, short-ranged resonating valence bond (RVB) wave functions can be sampled without the sign problem using a recently-developed Pfaffian Monte Carlo scheme. In this paper, we study the Renyi entanglement entropy in these wave functions using a replica-trick method. Using various spatial bipartitions, including the Levin-Wen construction, our finite-size scaled Renyi entropy gives a topological contribution consistent with γ=ln(2)\gamma = \text{ln}(2), as expected for a gapped Z2\mathbb{Z}_{2} quantum spin liquid. We prove that the mutual statistics are consistent with the toric code anyon model and rule out any other quasiparticle statistics such as the double semion model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1510.07682,
  title  = {Entanglement Entropy and Topological Order in Resonating Valence-Bond Quantum Spin Liquids},
  author = {Julia Wildeboer and Alexander Seidel and Roger G. Melko},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.07682},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

4 pages, 10 pages supplemental material, references updated, text passage rewritten for clarity