Universal Wave-Function Overlap and Universal Topological Data from Generic Gapped Ground States

Abstract

We propose a way - universal wave-function overlap - to extract universal topological data from generic ground states of gapped systems in any dimensions. Those extracted topological data might fully characterize the topological orders with a gapped or gapless boundary. For nonchiral topological orders in (2+1)D, these universal topological data consist of two matrices S and T, which generate a projective representation of SL(2,Z) on the degenerate ground state Hilbert space on a torus. For topological orders with a gapped boundary in higher dimensions, these data constitute a projective representation of the mapping class group MCG(Md) of closed spatial manifold Md. For a set of simple models and perturbations in two dimensions, we show that these quantities are protected to all orders in perturbation theory. These overlaps provide a much more powerful alternative to the topological entanglement entropy and allow for more efficient numerical implementations.