Projected Entangled-Pair States Can Describe Chiral Topological States

Abstract

We show that projected entangled-pair states (PEPS) in two spatial dimensions can describe chiral topological states by explicitly constructing a family of such states with a nontrivial Chern number. They are ground states of two different kinds of free-fermion Hamiltonians: (i)local and gapless; (ii)gapped, but with hopping amplitudes that decay according to a power law. We derive general conditions on topological free-fermionic projected entangled-pair states that show that they cannot correspond to exact ground states of gapped, local parent Hamiltonians and provide numerical evidence demonstrating that they can nevertheless approximate well the physical properties of topological insulators with local Hamiltonians at arbitrary temperatures.