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arXiv:1308.2882 · Physical Review A

Towards experimental tests and applications of Lieb-Robinson bounds

Kolja Them

Published Feb 27, 2014• 12 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy is identified as a suitable experimental technique to investigate the quantitative quality of Lieb-Robinson bounds on the signal velocity. The latest, most general bound is simplified and it is shown that there is a discrepancy by a factor of approximately 4 between the corresponding limit speed and some estimated exact velocities in atomic spin chains. The observed discrepancy facilitates conclusions for a further mathematical improvement of Lieb-Robinson bounds. The real signal propagation can be modified with several experimental parameters from which the bounds are independent. This enables the application of Lieb-Robinson bounds as upper limits on the enhancement of the real signal speed for information transport in spintronic devices.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.89.022126

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Spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy is identified as a suitable experimental technique to investigate the quantitative quality of Lieb-Robinson bounds on the signal velocity. The latest, most general bound is simplified and it is shown that there is a discrepancy by a factor of approximately 4 between the corresponding limit speed and some estimated exact velocities in atomic spin chains. The observed discrepancy facilitates conclusions for a further mathematical improvement of Lieb-Robinson bounds. The real signal propagation can be modified with several experimental parameters from which the bounds are independent. This enables the application of Lieb-Robinson bounds as upper limits on the enhancement of the real signal speed for information transport in spintronic devices.
The Lieb-Robinson bound (LRB) states that the range and strength of interactions between the constituents of a complex many-body system impose upper limits to how fast the signal can propagate. It manifests in a light conelike growth of correlation function connecting two distant subsystems. Here, we employ the techniques of quantum information to demonstrate that the LRB can be determined from local measurements performed on a single qubit that is connected to a many-body system. This formulation provides an operational recipe for estimating the LRB in complex systems, replacing the measurement of the correlation function with simple single-particle manipulations. We demonstrate the potency of this approach by deriving the upper limit to the speed of signal propagation in the XY spin chain.
The Lieb-Robinson bound sets a theoretical upper limit on the speed at which information can propagate in nonrelativistic quantum spin networks. In its original version, it results in an exponentially exploding function of the evolution time, which is partially mitigated by an exponentially decreasing term that instead depends upon the distance covered by the signal (the ratio between the two exponents effectively defining an upper bound on the propagation speed). In the present paper, by properly accounting for the free parameters of the model, we show how to turn this construction into a stronger inequality where the upper limit only scales polynomially with respect to the evolution time. Our analysis applies to any chosen topology of the network, as long as the range of the associated interaction is explicitly finite. For the special case of linear spin networks we present also an alternative derivation based on a perturbative expansion approach which improves the previous inequality. In the same context we also establish a lower bound to the speed of the information spread which yields a nontrivial result at least in the limit of small propagation times.
The Lieb-Robinson bound shows the existence of a maximum speed of signal propagation in discrete quantum mechanical systems with local interactions. This generalizes the concept of relativistic causality beyond field theory, and provides a powerful tool in theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum information science. Here, we extend the scope of this seminal result by considering general markovian quantum evolution, where we prove that an equivalent bound holds. In addition, we use the generalized bound to demonstrate that correlations in the stationary state of a Markov process decay on a length scale set by the Lieb-Robinson velocity and the system's relaxation time.
The Lieb-Robinson theorem states that information propagates with a finite velocity in quantum systems on a lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. What are the speed limits on information propagation in quantum systems with power-law interactions, which decay as 1/r^{α} at distance r? Here, we present a definitive answer to this question for all exponents α>2d and all spatial dimensions d. Schematically, information takes time at least r^{min{1,α-2d}} to propagate a distance r. As recent state transfer protocols saturate this bound, our work closes a decades-long hunt for optimal Lieb-Robinson bounds on quantum information dynamics with power-law interactions.
The Lieb-Robinson (LR) bound rigorously shows that in quantum systems with short-range interactions, the maximum amount of information that travels beyond an effective "light cone" decays exponentially with distance from the light-cone front, which expands at finite velocity.Despite being a fundamental result, existing bounds are often extremely loose, limiting their applications.We introduce a method that dramatically and qualitatively improves LR bounds in models with finite-range interactions.Most prominently, in systems with a large local Hilbert space dimension D, our method gives a LR velocity that grows much slower than previous bounds with D as D → ∞.For example, in the Heisenberg model with spin S, we find v ≤ const.compared to the previous v ∝ S, which diverges at large S, and in multiorbital Hubbard models with N orbitals, we find v ∝ √ N instead of previous v ∝ N , and similarly in the Nstate truncated Bose-Hubbard model and Wen's quantum rotor model.Our bounds also scale qualitatively better in some systems when the spatial dimension or certain model parameters become large, for example in the d-dimensional quantum Ising model and perturbed toric code models.Even in spin-1/2 Ising and Fermi-Hubbard models, our method improves the LR velocity by an order of magnitude with typical model parameters, and significantly improves the LR bound at large distance and early time.