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arXiv:1001.1006 · Physical Review A

Unfrustrated qudit chains and their ground states

Ramis Movassagh, Edward Farhi, Jeffrey Goldstone, Daniel Nagaj, Tobias J. Osborne, Peter W. Shor

Published Jul 19, 2010• 35 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We investigate chains of $d$-dimensional quantum spins (qudits) on a line with generic nearest-neighbor interactions without translational invariance. We find the conditions under which these systems are not frustrated, that is, when the ground states are also the common ground states of all the local terms in the Hamiltonians. The states of a quantum spin chain are naturally represented in the matrix product states (MPS) framework. Using imaginary time evolution in the MPS ansatz, we numerically investigate the range of parameters in which we expect the ground states to be highly entangled and find them hard to approximate using our MPS method.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.82.012318

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We investigate chains of ddd-dimensional quantum spins (qudits) on a line with generic nearest-neighbor interactions without translational invariance. We find the conditions under which these systems are not frustrated, that is, when the ground states are also the common ground states of all the local terms in the Hamiltonians. The states of a quantum spin chain are naturally represented in the matrix product states (MPS) framework. Using imaginary time evolution in the MPS ansatz, we numerically investigate the range of parameters in which we expect the ground states to be highly entangled and find them hard to approximate using our MPS method.
Abstract A systematic and compact treatment of arbitrary su (2) invariant spin- s quantum chains with nearest-neighbour interactions is presented. The ground-state is derived in terms of matrix product states (MPS). The fundamental MPS calculations consist of taking products of basic tensors of rank 3 and contractions thereof. The algebraic su (2) calculations are carried out completely by making use of Wigner calculus. As an example of application, the spin-1 bilinear-biquadratic quantum chain is investigated. Various physical quantities are calculated with high numerical accuracy of up to 8 digits. We obtain explicit results for the ground-state energy, entanglement entropy, singlet operator correlations and the string order parameter. We find an interesting crossover phenomenon in the correlation lengths.
We make extensive simulations over a spin chain model that combines the frustrated ${J}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{2}$ spin chain and the long-range nonfrustrated ${(\ensuremath{-}1)}^{(r\ensuremath{-}1)}{r}^{\ensuremath{-}\ensuremath{\alpha}}$ decay interactions through the variational matrix product state method for both finite and infinite lengths. We study both the ground-state entanglement and phase diagram. We find that it is most entangled in the rotation invariant long-range ordered antiferromagnetic phase, where the entanglement scales approximately logarithmically. We determine the development of the Majudar-Ghosh point to a disorder line from entanglement. And we approximately determine the transition from the dimerized and incommensurate phase of the ${J}_{1}\ensuremath{-}{J}_{2}$ model to a decoupled phase by studying spin correlation and the dimerization order parameter. Some implications for entanglement in systems with long-range interactions are stated.
I first give an overview of the thesis and Matrix Product States (MPS) representation of quantum spin chains with an improvement on the conventional notation. The rest of this thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is devoted to eigenvalues of quantum many-body systems (QMBS). I introduce Isotropic Entanglement, which draws from various tools in random matrix theory and free probability theory (FPT) to accurately approximate the eigenvalue distribution of QMBS on a line with generic interactions. Next, I discuss the energy distribution of one particle hopping random Schrödinger operator in 1D from FPT in context of the Anderson model. The second part is devoted to ground states and gap of QMBS. I first give the necessary background on frustration free (FF) Hamiltonians, real and imaginary time evolution within MPS representation and a numerical implementation. I then prove the degeneracy and FF condition for quantum spin chains with generic local interactions, including corrections to our earlier assertions. I then summarize my efforts in proving lower bounds for the entanglement of the ground states, which includes some new results, with the hope that they inspire future work resulting in solving the conjecture given therein. Next I discuss two interesting measure zero examples where FF Hamiltonians are carefully constructed to give unique ground states with high entanglement. One of the examples (i.e., d=4d=4d=4) has not appeared elsewhere. In particular, we calculate the Schmidt numbers exactly, entanglement entropies and introduce a novel technique for calculating the gap which may be of independent interest. The last chapter elaborates on one of the measure zero examples (i.e., d=3d=3d=3) which is the first example of a FF translation-invariant spin-1 chain that has a unique highly entangled ground state and exhibits signatures of a critical behavior.
Matrix product states (MPS) are quintessential examples of frustration-free gapped ground states of local interactions called parent Hamiltonians. In this work, we investigate parent Hamiltonians for a class of ergodic matrix product states (EMPS), which are MPS defined by site-dependent random tensors {Xj[k]}j=1D\{X_j^{[k]}\}_{j=1}^D{Xj[k]​}j=1D​ which are homogeneously distributed at every site kkk in the spin chain. Here, the EMPS are not translation-invariant but rather statistically translation-invariant. Under a mild injectivity assumption, we show the thermodynamic limit of an EMPS is the unique frustration-free ground state of a parent Hamiltonian on the whole spin chain, which, depending on the statistical properties of the EMPS, may or may not be finite-range. In contrast to the translation-invariant regime, these Hamiltonians need not be gapped. Nevertheless, applying the martingale method while keeping track of local statistics gives conditions for a gap, in addition to pointing towards why there need not be a gap in general. We include examples of EMPS both with and without spectral gaps to illustrate our results.
A key feature of ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians is their relatively low entanglement --- they are well approximated by matrix product states (MPS) with bond dimension scaling polynomially in the length N of the chain, while general states require a bond dimension scaling exponentially. We show that the bond dimension of these MPS approximations can be improved to a constant, independent of the chain length, if we relax our notion of approximation to be more local: for all length- k segments of the chain, the reduced density matrices of our approximations are ϵ -close to those of the exact state. If the state is a ground state of a gapped local Hamiltonian, the bond dimension of the approximation scales like (k/ϵ)1+o(1) , and at the expense of worse but still poly (k,1/ϵ) scaling of the bond dimension, we give an alternate construction with the additional features that it can be generated by a constant-depth quantum circuit with nearest-neighbor gates, and that it applies generally for any state with exponentially decaying correlations. For a completely general state, we give an approximation with bond dimension exp⁡(O(k/ϵ)) , which is exponentially worse, but still independent of N . Then, we consider the prospect of designing an algorithm to find a local approximation for ground states of gapped local 1D Hamiltonians. When the Hamiltonian is translationally invariant, we show that the ability to find O(1) -accurate local approximations to the ground state in T(N) time implies the ability to estimate the ground state energy to O(1) precision in O(T(N)log⁡(N)) time.
Matrix-product state (MPS) skeletons are connected networks of Hamiltonians with exact MPS ground states that underlie a phase diagram. Such skeletons have previously been found in classes of free-fermion models. For the translation-invariant BDI and AIII free-fermion classes, it has been shown that the underlying skeleton is dense, giving an analytic approach to MPS approximation of ground states anywhere in the class. In this paper, we partially expose the skeleton in certain interacting spin chains: the NNN-state Onsager-integrable chiral clock families. We construct MPS that form a dense MPS skeleton in the gapped regions surrounding a sequence of fixed-point Hamiltonians (the generators of the Onsager algebra). Outside these gapped regions, these MPS remain eigenstates, but no longer give the many-body ground state. Rather, they are ground states in particular sectors of the spectrum. Our methods also allow us to find further MPS eigenstates; these correspond to low-lying excited states within the aforementioned gapped regions. This set of MPS excited states goes beyond the previous analysis of ground states on the N=2N=2N=2 free-fermion MPS skeleton. As an application of our results, we find a closed form for the disorder parameter in a family of interacting models. Finally, we remark that many of our results use only the Onsager algebra and are not specific to the chiral clock model representation.