English

Projected entangled-pair states can describe chiral topological states

Strongly Correlated Electrons 2013-12-20 v3 Quantum Physics

Abstract

We show that Projected Entangled-Pair States (PEPS) in two spatial dimensions can describe chiral topological states by explicitly constructing a family of such states with a non-trivial Chern number. They are ground states of two different kinds of free-fermion Hamiltonians: (i) local and gapless; (ii) gapped, but with hopping amplitudes that decay according to a power law. We derive general conditions on topological free fermionic PEPS which show that they cannot correspond to exact ground states of gapped, local parent Hamiltonians, and provide numerical evidence demonstrating that they can nevertheless approximate well the physical properties of topological insulators with local Hamiltonians at arbitrary temperatures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1308.0316,
  title  = {Projected entangled-pair states can describe chiral topological states},
  author = {T. B. Wahl and H. -H. Tu and N. Schuch and J. I. Cirac},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1308.0316},
  year   = {2013}
}

Comments

v2: minor changes, references added. v3: accepted version, Journal-Ref added