Condensation-Driven Phase Transitions in Perturbed String Nets

Abstract

We develop methods to probe the excitation spectrum of topological phases of matter in two spatial dimensions. Applying these to the Fibonacci string nets perturbed away from exact solvability, we analyze a topological phase transition driven by the condensation of non-Abelian anyons. Our numerical results illustrate how such phase transitions involve the spontaneous breaking of a topological symmetry, generalizing the traditional Landau paradigm. The main technical tool is the characterization of the ground states using tensor networks and the topological properties using matrix-product-operator symmetries. The topological phase transition manifests itself by symmetry breaking in the entanglement degrees of freedom of the quantum transfer matrix.