Perturbative analysis of topological entanglement entropy from conditional independence

Abstract

We use the structure of conditionally independent states to analyze the stability of topological entanglement entropy. For the ground state of the quantum double or Levin-Wen model, we obtain a bound on the first-order perturbation of topological entanglement entropy in terms of its energy gap and subsystem size. The bound decreases superpolynomially with the size of the subsystem, provided the energy gap is nonzero. We also study the finite-temperature stability of stabilizer models, for which we prove a stronger statement than the strong subadditivity of entropy. Using this statement and assuming (i) finite correlation length and (ii) small conditional mutual information of certain configurations, first-order perturbation effect for arbitrary local perturbation can be bounded. We discuss the technical obstacles in generalizing these results.

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