Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Recently, it was proposed that the chiral central charge of a gapped, two-dimensional quantum many-body system is proportional to a bulk ground state entanglement measure known as the modular commutator. While there is significant evidence to support this relation, we show in this Letter that it is not universal. We give examples of lattice systems that have vanishing chiral central charge, which nevertheless give nonzero "spurious" values for the modular commutator for arbitrarily large system sizes, in both one and two dimensions. Our examples are based on cluster states and utilize the fact that they can generate nonlocal modular Hamiltonians.
Source: Physical Review Letters
Authors: Julian Gass, Michael Levin
Institution: University of Chicago
Language: English
Topic: Quantum many-body systems
Subfield: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
Funders: Simons Foundation, University of Chicago
Awards: G6775432275, G7219164951
OpenAlex ID: W4405656152