Mike Zaletel, Universal tripartite entanglement in CFTs and topological phases

Bipartite entanglement, as quantified by the entangled entropy, is well understood to be both a useful diagnostic for quantum phases and as a key determinant of the difficulty of tensor network calculations. Tripartite entanglement admits an even richer space of possibilities, but the structure of tripartite entanglement in many-body systems and its implication for 2D tensor network calculations is poorly understood. In this talk I will discuss two new measures of tripartite entanglement as they apply to many-body systems. I will show that these measures provide a UV and IR finite measure of the central charge of a 1D CFT, in contrast to the entanglement entropy which has a log-divergence. Leveraging this finding, I will argue that these measures further provide the first entanglement diagnostic of a 2D chiral topological phase which doesn't require symmetry, and speculate on the implications for 2D tensor network calculations.