Entanglement and fidelity across quantum phase transitions in locally perturbed topological codes with open boundaries

TL;DR

This paper explores quantum phase transitions in the Kitaev code under local perturbations, analyzing entanglement, fidelity susceptibility, and boundary effects to understand topological robustness and critical behavior.

Contribution

It introduces a finite-size scaling analysis of fidelity susceptibility and entanglement to characterize phase transitions in perturbed topological codes with open boundaries.

Findings

Fidelity susceptibility diverges as a power law at the quantum critical point.

Open boundaries enhance the robustness of the topological phase.

A local entanglement witness exhibits a logarithmic divergence at the phase transition.

Abstract

We investigate the topological-to-non-topological quantum phase transitions (QPTs) occurring in the Kitaev code under local perturbations in the form of local magnetic field and spin-spin interactions of the Ising-type using fidelity susceptibility (FS) and entanglement as the probes. We assume the code to be embedded on the surface of a wide cylinder of height $M$ and circumference $D$ with $M\ll D$. We demonstrate a power-law divergence of FS across the QPT, and determine the quantum critical points (QCPs) via a finite-size scaling analysis. We verify these results by mapping the perturbed Kitaev code to the 2D Ising model with nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions, and computing the single-site magnetization as order parameter using quantum Monte-Carlo technique. We also demonstrate a finite size odd-even dichotomy in the occurrence of the QPT in the Kitaev ladder with respect to the odd and even values of $D$, when the system is perturbed with only Ising interaction. Our results also indicate a higher robustness of the topological phase of the Kitaev code against local perturbations if the boundary is made open along one direction. We further consider a local entanglement witness operator designed specifically to capture a lower bound to the localizable entanglement on the vertical non-trivial loop of the code. We show that the first derivative of the expectation value of the witness operator exhibits a logarithmic divergence across the QPT, and perform the finite-size scaling analysis. We demonstrate similar behaviour of the expectation value of the appropriately constructed witness operator also in the case of locally perturbed color code with open boundaries.