English

Many-body-localization protection of eigenstate topological order in two dimensions

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks 2024-11-15 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Quantum Physics

Abstract

Many-body localization (MBL) has been proposed to enable and protect topological order in all eigenstates, vastly expanding the traditional ground-state setting. However, for the most intriguing case of two-dimensional (2D) systems with anyons and topology-dependent degeneracies, the dense many-body spectrum challenges studying this MBL protection numerically. Here we use large-scale full-spectrum variational ans\"atze to demonstrate MBL-protected topological order in the disordered 2D toric code perturbed by magnetic fields. We show that the system has topological local integrals of motion (tLIOMs) for magnetic field strengths below hc0.1h_c\approx0.1 times the toric code coupling scale. Combining tLIOMs with exact diagonalization, we also identify high-energy topological multiplets in the dense many-body spectrum. The phase diagram we find is consistent with toric-code and trivial MBL phases being separated by an intervening thermal phase.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2212.09775,
  title  = {Many-body-localization protection of eigenstate topological order in two dimensions},
  author = {Florian Venn and Thorsten B. Wahl and Benjamin Béri},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.09775},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

9 pages, 6 figures; v2: accepted manuscript