English

Ground state entanglement constrains low-energy excitations

Quantum Physics 2015-09-24 v3 Strongly Correlated Electrons

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