Entanglement and Disordered-Enhanced Topological Phase in the Kitaev Chain

2018/11/30 by Liron Levy, Moshe Goldstein · 14 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Condensed Matter Physics #MAJORANA #Phase (matter) #Phase diagram #Quantum #Quantum entanglement #Quantum many-body systems #Quantum phases #Topological Materials and Phenomena #Topological entropy in physics #Topological order #Topology (electrical circuits) #cond-mat.dis-nn #cond-mat.mes-hall #cond-mat.str-el

paper · pdf · doi:10.3390/universe5010033

published in Universe 5(1), 33 (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute) · 11 pages, 4 figures; Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICNFP 2018). v2: published version

arxiv created 2019/01/17 · openalex publication_date 2019/01/17 · arxiv updated 2019/01/18 · openalex created_date 2019/01/25 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05

Abstract

In recent years, tools from quantum information theory have become indispensable in characterizing many-body systems. In this work, we employ measures of entanglement to study the interplay between disorder and the topological phase in 1D systems of the Kitaev type, which can host Majorana end modes at their edges. We find that the entanglement entropy may actually increase as a result of disorder, and identify the origin of this behavior in the appearance of an infinite-disorder critical point. We also employ the entanglement spectrum to accurately determine the phase diagram of the system, and find that disorder may enhance the topological phase, and lead to the appearance of Majorana zero modes in systems whose clean version is trivial.

Citations

• Localization in disordered superconducting wires with broken spin-rotation symmetry
• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Experimental and materials considerations for the topological superconducting state in electron- and hole-doped semiconductors: Searching for non-Abelian Majorana modes in 1D nanowires and 2D heterostructures
• Calculation of reduced density matrices from correlation functions
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• The density-matrix renormalization group in the age of matrix product states
• Unpaired Majorana fermions in quantum wires
• Entanglement in many-body systems
• Topological order in the Kitaev/Majorana chain in the presence of disorder and interactions