Entanglement Signatures of Multipolar Higher Order Topological Phases

Abstract

We propose a procedure that characterizes free-fermion or interacting multipolar higher-order topological phases via their bulk entanglement structure. To this end, we construct nested entanglement Hamiltonians by first applying an entanglement cut to the ordinary many-body ground state, and then iterating the procedure by applying further entanglement cuts to the (assumed unique) ground state of the entanglement Hamiltonian. We argue that an $n$-th order multipolar topological phase can be characterized by the features of its $n$-th order nested entanglement Hamiltonian e.g., degeneracy in the entanglement spectrum. We explicitly compute nested entanglement spectra for a set of higher-order fermionic and bosonic multipole phases and show that our method successfully identifies such phases.

12+4 pages, 6 figures