Entanglement and Disordered-Enhanced Topological Phase in the Kitaev Chain

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.

11 pages, 4 figures; Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on New Frontiers in Physics (ICNFP 2018). v2: published version

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• Symmetry resolved entanglement: Exact results in 1D and beyond
• Entanglement topological invariants for one-dimensional topological superconductors
• Generalization of spectral bulk-boundary correspondence
• Coexistence of Strong and Weak Majorana Zero Modes in Anisotropic XY Spin Chain with Second-Neighbor Interaction
• Pattern-dependent proximity effect and Majorana edge mode in one-dimensional quasicrystals
• Disorder induced topological phase transition in a driven Majorana chain
• Quench-Probe Setup as Analyzer of Fractionalized Entanglement Spreading
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• Entanglement entropy scaling in critical phases of 1D quasiperiodic systems
• Entanglement dynamics in minimal Kitaev chains
• Analytical classification of Majorana zero-mode spatial profiles in extended Kitaev chains: probability maxima can shift inward