Toy model of boundary states with spurious topological entanglement entropy

Abstract

Topological entanglement entropy has been extensively used as an indicator of topologically ordered phases. We study the conditions needed for two-dimensional topologically trivial states to exhibit spurious contributions that contaminates topological entanglement entropy. We show that if the state at the boundary of a subregion is a stabilizer state, then it has a non-zero spurious contribution to the region if and only if, the state is in a non-trivial one-dimensional $G_1\times G_2$ symmetry-protected-topological (SPT) phase. However, we provide a candidate of a boundary state that has a non-zero spurious contribution but does not belong to any such SPT phase.

5+7 pages, 4 figures v2:published in PRResearch: Rapid Communication. Title is modified. Minor errors are fixed