Resilience of the topological phases to frustration.

Recently it was highlighted that one-dimensional antiferromagnetic spin models with frustrated boundary conditions, i.e. periodic boundary conditions in a ring with an odd number of elements, may show very peculiar behavior. Indeed the presence of frustrated boundary conditions can destroy the local magnetic orders presented by the models when different boundary conditions are taken into account and induce novel phase transitions. Motivated by these results, we analyze the effects of the introduction of frustrated boundary conditions on several models supporting (symmetry protected) topological orders, and compare our results with the ones obtained with different boundary conditions. None of the topological order phases analyzed are altered by this change. This observation leads naturally to the conjecture that topological phases of one-dimensional systems are in general not affected by topological frustration.

Entanglement, holonomic constraints, and the quantization of fundamental interactions.

We provide a proof for the necessity of quantizing fundamental interactions demonstrating that a quantum version is needed for any non trivial conservative interaction whose strength depends on the relative distance between two objects. Our proof is based on a consistency argument that in the presence of a classical field two interacting objects in a separable state could not develop entanglement. This requirement can be cast in the form of a holonomic constraint that cannot be satisfied by generic interparticle potentials. Extending this picture of local holonomic constraints, we design a protocol that allows to measure the terms of a multipole expansion of the interaction of two composite bodies. The results presented in this work can pave the way for a study of fundamental interactions based on the analysis of entanglement properties.