Hierarchy of entanglement renormalization and long-range entangled states

Abstract

As a quantum-informative window into quantum many-body physics, the concept and application of the entanglement renormalization group (ERG) have been playing a vital role in the study of novel quantum phases of matter, especially long-range entangled (LRE) states in topologically ordered systems. For instance, by recursively applying local unitaries as well as adding and removing qubits that form product states, the 2D toric code ground states, i.e., the fixed point of ${\mathbb{Z}}_{2}$ topological order, are efficiently coarse-grained with respect to the system size. As a further improvement, the addition and removal of 2D toric codes in the ground states of the 3D X-cube model is shown to be indispensable and, remarkably, leads to well-defined fixed points of a large class of fracton orders that are non-liquid-like. Here, we present a substantially unified ERG framework in which general degrees of freedom are allowed to be recursively added or removed. Specifically, we establish an exotic hierarchy of ERG and LRE states in Pauli stabilizer codes, where the 2D toric code and 3D X-cube models are naturally included. In the hierarchy, LRE states like 3D X-cube and 3D toric code ground states can be added or removed in ERG processes of more complex LRE states. In this way, a large group of Pauli stabilizer codes are categorized into a series of state towers; within each tower, in addition to local unitaries including cnot (controlled-NOT) gates, lower LRE states of level-$n$ are added or removed in the level-$n$ ERG process of an upper LRE state of level $(n+1)$, connecting LRE states of different levels and unveiling complex relations among LRE states. As future directions, we expect this hierarchy can be applied to more general LRE states, leading to a unified ERG scenario of LRE states and exact tensor-network representations in the form of more generalized branching multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz.