Published October 23, 2025 | Version Published
Journal Article Open

Sequential adiabatic generation of chiral topological states

  • 1. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 2. ROR icon University of Colorado Boulder

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

Files (1.9 MB)

Name Size
md5:11a83421f94e0f1e24c33568996addc1
1.9 MB Preview Download

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