Entanglement Entropy and Topological Order in Resonating Valence-Bond Quantum Spin Liquids

Abstract

On the triangular and kagome lattices, short-ranged resonating valence bond (RVB) wave functions can be sampled without the sign problem using a recently-developed Pfaffian Monte Carlo scheme. In this paper, we study the Renyi entanglement entropy in these wave functions using a replica-trick method. Using various spatial bipartitions, including the Levin-Wen construction, our finite-size scaled Renyi entropy gives a topological contribution consistent with $\gamma = \text{ln}(2)$, as expected for a gapped $\mathbb{Z}_{2}$ quantum spin liquid. We prove that the mutual statistics are consistent with the toric code anyon model and rule out any other quasiparticle statistics such as the double semion model.