Decohered color code and emerging mixed toric code by anyon proliferation: Topological entanglement negativity perspective

TL;DR

This paper investigates how decoherence affects the color code, leading to an intrinsic mixed-state topological order that resembles a single toric code, characterized by topological entanglement negativity.

Contribution

It introduces a gauging procedure for mixed stabilizer states and demonstrates the emergence of a toric code-like phase under decoherence using topological entanglement negativity.

Findings

Decoherence reduces TEN from 2 ln 2 to ln 2, indicating a transition to a single toric code.

Smooth crossover in TEN observed with varying decoherence strength.

Negativity scaling reveals subsystem partition dependence related to the emergent toric code.

Abstract

We study how the color code under decoherence gives rise to an intrinsic mixed-state topological order (imTO), which has no counterpart in pure ground states of local gapped Hamiltonians. For decoherence induced by XX-type operators on red links of the honeycomb lattice, we show that the resulting mixed state inherits half of the topological properties of the color code, including anyon content, logical operators, and topological entanglement structure. Using a gauging procedure for mixed stabilizer states, we identify the emergent phase as closely related to a single toric code. We characterize this phase by topological entanglement negativity (TEN) and perform efficient stabilizer-formalism simulations. While the pure color code has ${\rm TEN} = 2 \ln 2$, the maximally decohered state has ${\rm TEN} = \ln 2$, indicating emergence of a single toric code. By tuning the decoherence strength, we find a smooth crossover in TEN accompanied by a pronounced, nearly system-size-independent peak in its variance. We further show that the negativity exhibits characteristic scaling only for subsystem partitions commensurate with the triangular lattice of the emergent toric code. Our results demonstrate that negativity-based quantities provide powerful probes of mixed-state topological order generated by decoherence.