English

Robustness of a perturbed topological phase

Statistical Mechanics 2011-03-10 v2 High Energy Physics - Lattice High Energy Physics - Theory Quantum Physics

Abstract

We investigate the stability of the topological phase of the toric code model in the presence of a uniform magnetic field by means of variational and high-order series expansion approaches. We find that when this perturbation is strong enough, the system undergoes a topological phase transition whose first- or second-order nature depends on the field orientation. When this transition is of second order, it is in the Ising universality class except for a special line on which the critical exponent driving the closure of the gap varies continuously, unveiling a new topological universality class.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1012.1740,
  title  = {Robustness of a perturbed topological phase},
  author = {S. Dusuel and M. Kamfor and R. Orus and K. P. Schmidt and J. Vidal},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.1740},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, published version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:55:22.218Z