Toy model of boundary states with spurious topological entanglement entropy

Abstract

Topological entanglement entropy has been extensively used as an indicator of topologically ordered phases. We study the conditions needed for two-dimensional topologically trivial states to exhibit spurious contributions that contaminate topological entanglement entropy. We show that, if the state at the boundary of a subregion is a stabilizer state, then it has a nonzero spurious contribution to the region if and only if the state is in a nontrivial one-dimensional G_{1}×G_{2} symmetry-protected-topological (SPT) phase under an on-site symmetry. However, we provide a candidate of a boundary state that has a nonzero spurious contribution but does not belong to any such SPT phase.