Chiral Central Charge under Entanglement Area Law Deviations

The chiral central charge c₋ is a universal quantity characterizing chiral topological phases, appearing as a subleading correction to the entanglement area law in (2+1)D systems. Numerically extracting c₋ requires fitting entanglement entropy across multiple system sizes — a procedure that is sensitive to other subleading terms present in finite systems.

This project investigates how such competing correction structures systematically bias the extracted value of c₋, and characterizes the dependence of this bias on system size and geometry. Understanding these finite-size effects is essential for reliably diagnosing topological order from tensor-network or exact-diagonalization data.

Keywords: Topological order · Chiral central charge · Entanglement scaling · Area law · Finite-size effects