Entropic Barriers and the Kinetic Suppression of Topological Defects
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Quantum Physics arXiv:2602.16777 (quant-ph) [Submitted on 18 Feb 2026] Title:Entropic Barriers and the Kinetic Suppression of Topological Defects Authors:Yi-Lin Tsao, Zhu-Xi Luo View a PDF of the paper titled Entropic Barriers and the Kinetic Suppression of Topological Defects, by Yi-Lin Tsao and Zhu-Xi Luo View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Many quantum phases, from topological orders to superfluids, are destabilized at finite temperature by the proliferation and motion of topological defects such as anyons or vortices. Conventional protection mechanisms rely on energetic gaps and fail once thermal fluctuations exceed the gap scale. Here we examine a complementary mechanism of entropic protection, in which defect nucleation is suppressed by coupling to mesoscopic auxiliary reservoirs of dimension $M$, generating an effective free-energy barrier that increases with temperature. In the Ising chain, this produces a characteristic three-regime evolution of the correlation length as a function of temperature - linear growth, entropy-controlled plateau, and eventual breakdown - indicating a general modification of defect behavior. Focusing on two spatial dimensions, where true finite-temperature topological order is forbidden in the thermodynamic limit, we show that entropic protection can nevertheless strongly enhance stabilization at finite system size, the regime directly relevant for quantum memory and experiments. Owing to the topological character of the defects, creation and transport are independently suppressed, yielding a double parametric reduction of logical errors in the entropic toric code and enhanced coherence when the framework is extended to Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless transitions. Entropic barriers thus provide a passive and scalable route to stabilizing quantum phases in experimentally relevant regimes. We propose an experimental setup for entropic toric code using dual species Rydberg arrays with dressing. Comments: Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Strongly Correlated Electrons (cond-mat.str-el) Cite as: arXiv:2602.16777 [quant-ph] (or arXiv:2602.16777v1 [quant-ph] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2602.16777 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite Submission history From: Yi-Lin Tsao [view email] [v1] Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:00:02 UTC (978 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Entropic Barriers and the Kinetic Suppression of Topological Defects, by Yi-Lin Tsao and Zhu-Xi LuoView PDFHTML (experimental)TeX Source view license Current browse context: quant-ph new | recent | 2026-02 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.str-el References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADSGoogle Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) Links to Code Toggle Papers with Code (What is Papers with Code?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)