Speaker
Description
In this talk, I will present the series of work that explores the landscape of mixed-state phases of matter, from axiomatic approaches to information-theoretic/hydrodynamic consequences. First, I will establish a systematic framework to study mixed-state phases of matter. This is achieved by identifying three information-theoretic quantities that can play the role analogous to the spectral gap in the study of quantum phases of matter. These three conditions correspond to (i) local recoverability, (ii) no long-range correlations, and (iii) spatial uniformity. States obeying them exactly are fixed points, while only approximately are phases of matter away from fixed points. I will discuss how approximate versions of these conditions provide robust topological data. Taking further steps, I will introduce the notion of “information critical phase”, which is characterized by continuously tunable fractional amount of remaining information.