Ground state entanglement constrains low-energy excitations
Abstract
For a general quantum many-body system, we show that its ground-state entanglement imposes a fundamental constraint on the low-energy excitations. For two-dimensional systems, our result implies that any system that supports anyons must have a nonvanishing topological entanglement entropy. We demonstrate the generality of this argument by applying it to three-dimensional quantum many-body systems, and showing that there is a pair of ground state topological invariants that are associated to their physical boundaries. From the pair, one can determine whether the given boundary can or cannot absorb point-like or line-like excitations.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1410.7411,
title = {Ground state entanglement constrains low-energy excitations},
author = {Isaac H. Kim and Benjamin J. Brown},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1410.7411},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
4+6 pages, 22 figures, comments welcome; v2 typos and figures corrected, extended discussion on 3D invariant; v3 typos corrected, published version