Higher-order entanglement and many-body invariants for higher-order topological phases

Abstract

We discuss how strongly interacting higher-order symmetry protected topological (HOSPT) phases can be characterized from the entanglement perspective: First, we introduce a topological many-body invariant which reveals the noncommutative algebra between a flux operator and C_{n} rotations. We argue that this invariant denotes the angular momentum carried by the instanton which is closely related to the discrete Wen-Zee response and the fractional corner charge. Second, we define a new entanglement property, dubbed “higher-order entanglement,” to scrutinize and differentiate various higher-order topological phases from a hierarchical sequence of the entanglement structure. We support our claims by numerically studying a super-lattice Bose-Hubbard model that exhibits different HOSPT phases.