English

Genuine Multi-Entropy in the Toric Code

High Energy Physics - Theory 2026-07-07 v1 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

We study genuine multi-entropy as a diagnostic of multipartite entanglement in the toric code, which provides a controlled setting for probing multipartite structures in topologically ordered states. Our main question is whether genuine multi-entropy captures information that is not reducible to conventional lower-party entropic data, such as topological entanglement entropy. We first analyze toric-code ground states that admit a stabilizer-state description, where the relevant quantities can be evaluated exactly. In this sector, genuine multi-entropy reflects the topological structure and symmetries of the toric code, while exhibiting highly constrained relations to lower-party multi-entropies. We conjecture that, for stabilizer states and q4{q}\ge4, the q{q}-partite genuine multi-entropy at replica index n<qn<{q} collapses to a linear combination of multi-entropies involving at most q2{q}-2 parties. We establish this pattern explicitly for q=4{q}=4 in the toric code stabilizer sector: for n=2,3n=2,3, the genuine multi-entropy is proportional to the tripartite information I3I_3 and, for the Kitaev--Preskill partition, contains no independent genuine four-partite information beyond that captured by the topological entanglement entropy. At n=4n=4, however, this reduction breaks down: the genuine multi-entropy is no longer proportional to I3I_3, but remains a topological invariant of the toric-code stabilizer ground states. For generic non-stabilizer superpositions within the ground-state manifold and for coherent superpositions of local excitations, the low-nn reduction also fails. These results show that genuine multi-entropy probes multipartite entanglement structure beyond the tripartite information, and hence beyond the topological entanglement entropy in the Kitaev--Preskill partition, whereas for stabilizer states at low replica index it reduces to lower-partite entropic data.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.06050,
  title  = {Genuine Multi-Entropy in the Toric Code},
  author = {Sriram Akella and Norihiro Iizuka and Akihiro Miyata},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.06050},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 19 figures. Comments are welcome!