Topological vacuum structure of the Schwinger model with matrix product states

We numerically study the single-flavour Schwinger model in the Hamiltonian formulation with a topological $\theta$-term corresponding to a constant electric background field. By using numerical methods based on tensor networks, especially the one-dimensional matrix product states, we explore the non-trivial $\theta$-dependence of several lattice and continuum quantities. In particular, we compute the ground-state energy, the electric field, the chiral fermion condensate, and the topological vacuum susceptibility for positive, zero, and even negative fermion mass. In the chiral limit, we demonstrate that the continuum model becomes independent of the vacuum angle $\theta$, thus respecting CP invariance, while lattice artifacts still depend on $\theta$. We also confirm that negative masses can be mapped to positive masses by shifting $\theta\rightarrow \theta +\pi$ due to the axial anomaly in the continuum, while lattice artifacts non-trivially distort this mapping