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arXiv:1809.06369 · Physical Review A

Improved Lieb-Robinson bound for many-body Hamiltonians with power-law interactions

Dominic V. Else, Francisco Machado, Chetan Nayak, Norman Y. Yao

Published Feb 26, 2020• 71 citations
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Abstract

In this paper, we prove a family of Lieb-Robinson bounds for discrete spin systems with long-range interactions. Our results apply for arbitrary $k$-body interactions, so long as they decay with a power law greater than $kd$, where $d$ is the dimension of the system. More precisely, we require that the sum of the norm of terms with diameter greater than or equal to $R$, acting on any one site, decays as a power law $1/{R}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, with $\ensuremath{\alpha}>d$. These bounds allow us to prove that, at any fixed time, the spatial decay of a time evolved operator follows arbitrarily closely to $1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$. Moreover, we introduce an alternative light cone definition for power-law interacting quantum systems which captures the region of the system where changing the Hamiltonian can affect the evolution of a local operator. In short-range interacting systems, this light cone agrees with the conventional definition. However, in long-range interacting systems, our definition yields a stricter light cone, which is more relevant in most physical contexts.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.101.022333

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In this paper, we prove a family of Lieb-Robinson bounds for discrete spin systems with long-range interactions. Our results apply for arbitrary kkk-body interactions, so long as they decay with a power law greater than kdkdkd, where ddd is the dimension of the system. More precisely, we require that the sum of the norm of terms with diameter greater than or equal to RRR, acting on any one site, decays as a power law 1/R\ensuremathα1/{R}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}1/R\ensuremathα, with \ensuremathα>d\ensuremath{\alpha}>d\ensuremathα>d. These bounds allow us to prove that, at any fixed time, the spatial decay of a time evolved operator follows arbitrarily closely to 1/r\ensuremathα1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}1/r\ensuremathα. Moreover, we introduce an alternative light cone definition for power-law interacting quantum systems which captures the region of the system where changing the Hamiltonian can affect the evolution of a local operator. In short-range interacting systems, this light cone agrees with the conventional definition. However, in long-range interacting systems, our definition yields a stricter light cone, which is more relevant in most physical contexts.
In many-body quantum systems with spatially local interactions, quantum information propagates with a finite velocity, reminiscent of the ``light cone'' of relativity. In systems with long-range interactions which decay with distance rrr as $1/{r}^{\ensuremath{\alpha}}$, however, there are multiple light cones which control different information theoretic tasks. We show an optimal (up to logarithms) ``Frobenius light cone'' obeying $t\ensuremath{\sim}{r}^{min(\ensuremath{\alpha}\ensuremath{-}1,1)}$ for $\ensuremath{\alpha}>1$ in one-dimensional power-law interacting systems with finite local dimension: this controls, among other physical properties, the butterfly velocity characterizing many-body chaos and operator growth. We construct an explicit random Hamiltonian protocol that saturates the bound and settles the optimal Frobenius light cone in one dimension. We partially extend our constraints on the Frobenius light cone to a several operator ppp-norms, and show that Lieb-Robinson bounds can be saturated in at most an exponentially small ${e}^{\ensuremath{-}\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}(r)}$ fraction of the many-body Hilbert space.
Recent works have revealed the intricate effect of long-range interactions on information transport in quantum many-body systems: In DDD spatial dimensions, interactions decaying as a power-law r−αr^{-α}r−α with α>2D+1α> 2 D+1α>2D+1 exhibit a Lieb-Robinson bound (LRB) with a linear light cone and the threshold 2D+12D +12D+1 is sharp in general. Here, we observe that mutually commuting, long-range interactions satisfy an enhanced LRB of the form t r−αt \, r^{-α}tr−α for any α>0α>0α>0, and this scaling is sharp. In particular, the linear light cone occurs at α=1α= 1α=1 in any dimension. Part of our motivation stems from quantum error-correcting codes. As applications, we derive enhanced bounds on ground state correlations and an enhanced local perturbations perturb locally (LPPL) principle for which we adapt a recent subharmonicity argument of Wang-Hazzard. Similar enhancements hold for commuting interactions with stretched exponential decay.
Lieb-Robinson bounds quantify the maximal speed of information spreading in nonrelativistic quantum systems.We discuss the relation of Lieb-Robinson bounds to out-of-time order correlators, which correspond to different norms of commutators C(r, t ) = [A i (t ), B i+r ] of local operators.Using an exact Krylov space-time evolution technique, we calculate these two different norms of such commutators for the spin-1/2 Heisenberg chain with interactions decaying as a power law 1/r α with distance r.Our numerical analysis shows that both norms (operator norm and normalized Frobenius norm) exhibit the same asymptotic behavior, namely, a linear growth in time at short times and a power-law decay in space at long distance, leading asymptotically to power-law light cones for α < 1 and to linear light cones for α > 1.The asymptotic form of the tails of C(r, t ) ∝ t/r α is described by short-time perturbation theory, which is valid at short times and long distances.
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.
Recent works have revealed the intricate effect of long-range interactions on information transport in quantum many-body systems: In D spatial dimensions, interactions decaying as a power-law r−α with α > 2D + 1 exhibit a Lieb-Robinson bound (LRB) with a linear light cone and the threshold 2D + 1 is sharp in general. Here, we observe that mutually commuting, long-range interactions satisfy an enhanced LRB of the form t r−α for any α > 0, and this scaling is sharp. In particular, the linear light cone occurs at α = 1 in any dimension. Part of our motivation stems from quantum error-correcting codes. As applications, we derive enhanced bounds on ground state correlations and an enhanced local perturbations perturb locally principle for which we adapt a recent subharmonicity argument of Wang-Hazzard. Similar enhancements hold for commuting interactions with stretched exponential decay.
The dynamics of quantum systems strongly depends on the local structure of the Hamiltonian. For short-range interacting systems, the well-known Lieb–Robinson bound defines the effective light cone with an exponentially small error with respect to the spatial distance, whereas we can obtain only polynomially small errors for distance in long-range interacting systems. In this paper, we derive a qualitatively new bound for quantum dynamics by considering how many spins can correlate with each other after time evolution. Our bound characterizes the number of spins which support the many-body entanglement with exponentially small errors and is valid for a large class of Hamiltonians including long-range interacting systems. To demonstrate the advantage of our approach in quantum many-body systems, we apply our bound to prove several fundamental properties which have not been derived from the Lieb–Robinson bound.