Researchers at the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian Academy of Sciences present a new measuring method to identify and characterize so-called topological invariants on various experimental platforms.
A particularly fascinating class of quantum states are topological states of matter. These states of matter are characterized by nonlocal quantum correlations and are particularly robust against local distortions that inevitably occur in experiments.
Topological invariants are mathematical expressions that describe common properties of topological spaces and make it possible to fully identify interacting topological states with global symmetry in one-dimensional, bosonic systems.
The specific feature of this method is that although the topological invariants are highly complex, non-local correlation functions, they can still be extracted from statistical correlations of simple, local random measurements. (Phys.org)
The paper has been published in Science Advances.