Topological invariants for SPT entanglers
Carolyn Zhang
Department of Physics, Kadanoff Center for Theoretical Physics, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637, USA
(Dated: October 7, 2022)
We develop a framework for classifying locality preserving unitaries (LPUs) with internal, unitary symmetries
in ddimensions, based on (d−1) dimensional “flux insertion operators” which are easily computed from the
unitary. Using this framework, we obtain formulas for topological invariants of LPUs that prepare, or entangle,
symmetry protected topological phases (SPTs). These formulas serve as edge invariants for Floquet topological
phases in (d+ 1) dimensions that “pump” d-dimensional SPTs. For 1D SPT entanglers and certain higher
dimensional SPT entanglers, our formulas are completely closed-form.
I. INTRODUCTION
In recent years, there has been much progress in not
only classifying topological quantum phases, but also in un-
derstanding methods for detection and preparation of such
phases. Methods for preparing, or “entangling,” a state in a
topological phase are deeply connected to the entanglement
properties of the phase[1]. For example, it was shown that
a state in a long-range entangled phase, such as a 2D topo-
logical order, cannot be prepared by any finite depth quantum
circuit (FDQC). Instead, such a state can only be prepared
either by a circuit whose depth scales with the system size[2–
4] or by supplementing an FDQC with measurements and
post-selection[5–9]. On the other hand, short-range entangled
phases such as symmetry-protected topological phases (SPTs)
can be prepared by FDQCs, but these circuits must contain lo-
cal gates that break the symmetry[1,10].
Interestingly, broad classes of SPT phases can be entangled
by FDQCs that, though containing gates that break the sym-
metry, respect the symmetry as a whole[1,11–13]. Some-
times, an SPT cannot be entangled by an FDQC that respects
the symmetry as a whole, but can be entangled by a more
general locality preserving unitary (LPU) which respects the
symmetry[14–16]. When the locality is strict, without expo-
nentially decaying tails, these nontrivial LPUs are also known
as quantum cellular automata (QCA)[17–19].
LPUs have also recently received attention because they
describe the stroboscopic boundary dynamics of many-body
localized, periodically driven systems, also known as Flo-
quet systems[17,20,21]. LPUs with symmetry describe the
boundary dynamics of these kinds of Floquet systems when
the drive is constrained to respect the symmetry[22–25]. Non-
trivial Gsymmetric Floquet systems in dspatial dimensions
can “pump” (d−1) dimensional GSPTs to the boundary every
period[22,23,26]. For these systems, the stroboscopic bound-
ary dynamics is described by a Gsymmetric (d−1) dimen-
sional SPT entangler. These kinds of boundary unitaries have
been classified and studied in exactly solvable models[23,24]
and matrix product unitaries[27–31].
Although LPUs with various kinds of symmetry have been
classified, there exist very few explicit formulas for topologi-
cal invariants of these LPUs. For bosonic systems in 1D with-
out any symmetry, there is an explicit formula that takes as
input an LPU and produces the GNVW index, that classifies
LPUs without any symmetry[17,20]. In this work, we will
provide similar formulas for topological invariants of LPUs
with symmetry. These formulas also serve as boundary invari-
ants for many-body localized Floquet systems with symmetry.
For simplicity, we will consider only LPUs with strict locality.
In general, nontrivial Gsymmetric strict LPUs fall into two
classes: those that entangle SPTs and those that do not entan-
gle SPTs. For example, all nontrivial strict LPUs with discrete
symmetries in 1D entangle SPTs[22], while nontrivial strict
LPUs with U(1) symmetry in 1D are not related to SPTs[25].
In this work, we will obtain formulas for topological invari-
ants of Gsymmetric strict LPUs that are SPT entanglers. To
specify that we are restricting to this particular subset of G
symmetric strict LPUs, we will refer to them as Gsymmet-
ric SPT entanglers in the remainder of this work. In partic-
ular, we will focus on symmetric entanglers for bosonic “in-
cohomology” SPTs. These SPTs are classified by elements
of Hd+1(G, U(1)), and we will show that for the dimensions
and symmetries we consider, the topological invariants com-
puted from our formulas completely specify this element. In
short, in this work, we present formulas that take as input a G
symmetric SPT entangler and produce topological invariants
that completely specify the SPT phase it entangles.
We have two guiding principles. First, of course, our for-
mulas must produce the same result for two equivalent LPUs,
that entangle the same SPT phase. Roughly speaking, our for-
mulas must be insensitive to modification of the input uni-
tary by any strictly local, symmetric unitary. This means that
they will also be insensitive to Gsymmetric FDQCs, which
are FDQC constructed out of such symmetric local unitaries.
Second, we try to make our formulas as closed-form as possi-
ble. This means that whenever possible, they only involve the
truncation of operators that are products of on-site operators,
such as on-site symmetry operators. In particular, when Gis
unitary, we do not truncate the SPT entangler.
These two guiding principles, along with the fact that we
classify Gsymmetric SPT entanglers rather than SPT states,
differentiate the work we present here from previous related
work. In particular, most work related to classifying SPTs via
their entanglers do not assume that the entanglers respect the
symmetry[32–37]. This extra assumption allows us to make
our invariants more explicit. Since broad classes of SPTs can
be entangled by symmetric entanglers, we do not lose much
generality in making this assumption. Ref. 13 also assumed
that the SPT entangler is symmetric as a whole. Using the
SPT entangler truncated to a finite disk, they obtained a corre-
sponding “anomalous edge representation of the symmetry.”
arXiv:2210.02485v1 [cond-mat.str-el] 5 Oct 2022