The paper by Mark J. Arildsen and Andreas W. W. Ludwig from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and our group leader Norbert Schuch has recently been published in Physical Review B [Phys. Rev. B 108, 245150 (2023)].

In their paper, the authors use a synergy between tensor networks and methods from conformal field theory to explain the entanglement spectrum of a topological spin liquid which exhibits an almost chiral entanglement spectrum. They show how the spectrum, and more specifically its state counting, can be explained as arising from the combination of two branches with opposite chirality and vastly different velocities, making the entanglement spectrum look almost chiral. However, in their work, they discover a key difference in the level counting statistics between this model and a truly chiral spectrum. It can be used as a highly sensitive probe to tell apart truly chiral topological order from non-chiral systems whose entanglement spectra yet look very chiral, and thus constitutes an important novel tool in the study of chiral order in tensor networks and beyond.

For more info on this work take a look at the open-access version on arXiv or at the published paper in Physical Review B.

This work has received support through the ERC grant SEQUAM.
Calculations were partly performed on the Vienna Scientific Cluster (VSC).