Condensation-Driven Phase Transitions in Perturbed String Nets

Understand

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.