Universal entanglement probes of topological order and locally-achiral manifolds

Abstract

We consider the problem of identifying a topological order based on bulk entanglement of the ground-state wavefunction. Previous work showed that some universal information can be extracted from multi-entropy measures, a class of multipartite entanglement measures obtained by applying permutation operators exchanging the degrees of freedom between different replicas of the wavefunction. It remains an open question to what extent such entanglement measures can be used to extract any universal information from the ground state. Here we show that the topological partition function $Z(M)$ of a manifold $M$ can be extracted provided that $M$ satisfies a topological condition which we term ``local achirality". We show that locally-achiral manifolds can be used to extract universal properties of 2+1d topological phases that go beyond the $S$ and $T$ matrices. As a first step towards classifying locally-achiral manifolds, we show that, in four dimensions, such manifolds have vanishing Pontryagin number. We relate this property to the existence of beyond-cohomology time-reversal symmetry protected topological order (T-SPT) in four dimensions. Finally, we present an entanglement measure that detects this nontrivial T-SPT.