Many-body Physics of Information: Measurement, Decoherence, and Decoding
February 28, 2024 (Wed.) at 1:30PM (ET)
Urbana-Champaign
Information can be viewed as a fundamental element that constitutes the essence of physical systems. From this perspective, phases can be characterized or defined based on the inherent information content and its extraction. Expanding on this idea, we demonstrate that, under decoherence, various quantum many-body systems exhibit a phase transition behavior in terms of information-theoretic metrics. These information-theoretic phases starkly contrast conventional phase descriptions relying on order parameters, which often fail to capture these transitions. Our work offers three primary contributions: (i) a concrete understanding of information theoretic phase transitions and their physical implications with the lense of decoding (ii) information theoretic phase diagrams of various symmetry-protected and intrinsic topological orders under decoherence and faulty measurements. (iii) a comprehensive framework for understanding decoding transitions in families of topological quantum error correction codes. Therefore, our work introduces a novel framework to understand topological physics in mixed states through the lens of information theory.