Sequential adiabatic generation of chiral topological states
Abstract
In previous work, it was shown that non-trivial gapped states can be generated from a product state using a sequential quantum circuit. Explicit circuit constructions were given for a variety of gapped states at exactly solvable fixed points. In this paper, we show that a similar generation procedure can be established for chiral topological states as well, despite the fact that they lack a zero-correlation-length exactly solvable form. Instead of sequentially applying local unitary gates, we sequentially evolve the Hamiltonian by changing local terms in one subregion and then the next. The Hamiltonian remains gapped throughout the process, giving rise to an adiabatic evolution mapping the ground state from a product state to a chiral topological state. We demonstrate such a sequential adiabatic generation process for free fermion chiral states like the Chern Insulator and the p+ip p + i p superconductor. Moreover, we show that coupling a quantum state to a discrete gauge group can be achieved through a sequential quantum circuit, thereby generating interacting chiral topological states from the free fermion ones.
Copyright and License
Copyright X. Chen et al. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Published by the SciPost Foundation.
Acknowledgement
We are grateful for inspiring discussions with Michael Levin and Carolyn Zhang.
Funding
This work is supported by the Simons Collaboration on UltraQuantum Matter, funded by grants from the Simons Foundation (651438, XC; 651440, MH, DTS). XC is also supported by the Simons Investigator Award (Simons Foundation award ID 828078), the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter at Caltech and the Walter Burke
Institute for Theoretical Physics at Caltech.
Files
SciPostPhys_19_4_107.pdf
Additional details
Related works
- Is new version of
- Discussion Paper: arXiv:2402.03433 (arXiv)
Funding
- Simons Foundation
- 651438
- Simons Foundation
- 651440
- Simons Foundation
- 828078
- California Institute of Technology
Dates
- Submitted
-
2024-08-16
- Accepted
-
2025-09-23
Caltech Custom Metadata
- Caltech groups
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter , Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics , Division of Physics, Mathematics and Astronomy (PMA) , Physics Department
- Publication Status
- Published