Diagnosing 2D Symmetry Protected Topological States Via Mixed State Anomaly

Abstract Symmetry-protected topological phases are short-range entangled quantum states characterized by anomalous edge behavior, a manifestation of the bulk-boundary correspondence for topological phases. Moreover, the Li-Haldane conjecture posits that the entanglement spectrum exhibits the same anomaly as the physical edge spectrum, thereby serving as an entanglement-based fingerprint for identifying topological phases. In this work, we extend the entanglement-based diagnostic tools by demonstrating that the edge anomaly is manifested not only in the entanglement spectrum but also in the reduced density matrix itself, a phenomenon we refer to as the mixed-state anomaly. For the two-dimensional SPT phase, we derive a topological contribution in the disorder parameter as a consequence of this mixed-state anomaly. Furthermore, with additional time-reversal symmetry, the anomalous reduced density matrix induces a spontaneous-symmetry-breaking type long-range order in the presence of the disorder operator.