Fidelity analysis of topological quantum phase transitions

Damian F. Abasto, Alioscia Hamma, Paolo Zanardi

Published 2008-03-14, updated 2008-05-12Version 2

We apply the fidelity metric approach to analyze two recently introduced models that exhibit a quantum phase transition to a topologically ordered phase. These quantum models have a known connection to classical statistical mechanical models; we exploit this mapping to obtain the scaling of the fidelity metric tensor near criticality. The topological phase transitions manifest themselves in divergences of the fidelity metric across the phase boundaries. These results provide evidence that the fidelity approach is a valuable tool to investigate novel phases lacking a clear characterization in terms of local order parameters.