Accessing Gapped Chiral Phase with Auxiliary-Assisted PEPS

Abstract

It has been controversial whether infinite projected entangled pair state (PEPS) can faithfully describe chiral gapped phases in two dimensions or not. Finite-bond-dimension PEPS can capture many local and topological properties of chiral phases, but generically develop spurious long-range power-law like correlations. We introduce an auxiliary-assisted framework that bypass this obstruction by embedding the physical chiral system together with an auxiliary time-reversed partner, yielding a non-chiral enlarged representation whose physical chiral sector is recovered with controlled decoupling. For both a free-fermion Chern insulator and an interacting chiral spin liquid, the resulting PEPS show clean gapped correlation functions, and a finite transfer-matrix correlation length, in contrast with the artificial long-range tail of direct chiral PEPS representations. There exist small and negligibly coupling between the physical and auxiliary systems due to the finite entanglement effect, which only affect short-ranged local quantities. Despite the nonchiral enlarged representation, the chiral topological information remains encoded in the entanglement. Using layer-resolved momentum projection, we recover the expected universal chiral entanglement boundary spectrum. Our study provides a practical route to access gapped chiral phases with finite bond-dimension PEPS by changing the representation problem rather than directly studying the chiral pure state.