Topological phase structure of entangled qudits

Abstract

We discuss the appearance of fractional topological phases on cyclic evolutions of entangled qudits. The original result reported in Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{106}, 240503 (2011) is detailed and extended to qudits of different dimensions. The topological nature of the phase evolution and its restriction to fractional values are related to both the structure of the projective space of states and entanglement. For maximally entangled states of qudits with the same Hilbert space dimension, the fractional geometric phases are the only ones attainable under local SU($d$) operations, an effect that can be experimentally observed through conditional interference.