Editors' Suggestion in PRB: Multiwavefunction overlap and multientropy for topological ground states in (2+1) dimensions

30.09.2025

A new paper in Physical Review B investigates the topological and entropic properties of 2+1d many-body systems using multi-wavefunction overlaps.

Congratulations to our group member Shuhei Oyama and his co-authors Bowei Liu, Junjia Zhang, Yuya Kusuki, and Shinsei Ryu on the publication of their work "Multiwavefunction overlap and multientropy for topological ground states in (2 +1) dimensions" which has been featured as an Editors' Suggestion in Physical Review B [Phys. Rev. B 112, 125160 (2025)].

For more information on this paper, please take a look at the abstract below and at the article in Physical Review B or the open-access version on arXiv (DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2410.08284).


Abstract:
Multiwavefunction overlaps—generalizations of the quantum mechanical inner product for more than two quantum many-body states—are valuable tools for studying many-body physics. In this paper, we investigate the multiwavefunction overlap of (2+1)-dimensional gapped ground states, focusing particularly on symmetry-protected topological (SPT) states. We demonstrate how these overlaps can be calculated using the bulk-boundary correspondence and (1+1)-dimensional edge theories, specifically conformal field theory. When applied to SPT phases, we show that the topological invariants, which can be thought of as discrete higher Berry phases, can be extracted from the multiwavefunction overlap of four ground states with appropriate symmetry actions. Additionally, we find that the multiwavefunction overlap can be expressed in terms of the realignment of reduced density matrices. Furthermore, we illustrate that the same technique can be used to evaluate the multientropy—a quantum information theoretical quantity associated with multipartition of many-body quantum states—for (2+1)-dimensional gapped ground states. Combined with numerics, we show that the difference between multientropy for tripartition and second Rényi entropies is bounded from below by (ctot/4)⁢ ln⁡(2), where ctot is the central charge of ungappable degrees of freedom. To calculate multientropy numerically for free fermion systems (such as Chern insulators), we develop the correlator method for multientropy.


This work has received support through the ERC grant SEQUAM.