For a class of Hamiltonians of XXZ spin chains in a uniform external magnetic field that are small quantum perturbations of an Ising Hamiltonian, it is shown that the spectral gap above the ground-state energy remains strictly positive when the perturbation is turned on, uniformly in the length of the chain. This result is proven for rather generic perturbations of both the ferromagnetic and the antiferromagnetic Ising Hamiltonian. In the antiferromagnetic case, the external magnetic field is required to be small. For a chain of an even number of sites, the two-fold degenerate ground-state energy of the unperturbed antiferromagnetic Hamiltonian may split into two energy levels separated by a very small gap. These results are proven by using a new, quite subtle refinement of a method developed in earlier work and used to iteratively block-diagonalize Hamiltonians of systems confined to ever larger subsets of a lattice by using strictly local unitary conjugations. The new method developed in this paper provides complete control of boundary effects on the low-energy spectrum of perturbed Ising chains uniformly in their length.
In this paper, the local iterative Lie–Schwinger block-diagonalization method, introduced and developed in our previous work for quantum chains, is extended to higher-dimensional quantum lattice systems with Hamiltonians that can be written as the sum of an unperturbed gapped operator, consisting of a sum of on-site terms, and a perturbation, consisting of bounded interaction potentials of short range multiplied by a real coupling constant t. Our goal is to prove that the spectral gap above the ground-state energy of such Hamiltonians persists for sufficiently small values of |t|, independently of the size of the lattice. New ideas and concepts are necessary to extend our method to systems in dimension d > 1: As in our earlier work, a sequence of local block-diagonalization steps based on judiciously chosen unitary conjugations of the original Hamiltonian is introduced. The supports of effective interaction potentials generated in the course of these block-diagonalization steps can be identified with what we call minimal rectangles contained in the lattice, a concept that serves to tackle combinatorial problems that arise in the course of iterating the block-diagonalization steps. For a given minimal rectangle, control of the effective interaction potentials generated in each block-diagonalization step with support in the given rectangle is achieved by exploiting a variety of rather subtle mechanisms, which include, for example, the use of weighted sums of paths consisting of overlapping rectangles and of large denominators, expressed in terms of sums of orthogonal projections, which serve to control analogous sums of projections in the numerators resulting from the unitary conjugations of the interaction potential terms involved in the local block-diagonalization step.
In this paper we study the low-lying spectrum of the AKLT model perturbed by small, finite-range potentials and with open boundary conditions imposed at the edges of the chain. Our analysis is based on the local, iterative Lie Schwinger block-diagonalization method which allows us to control small interaction terms localized near the boundary of the chain that are responsible for the possible splitting of the ground-state energy of the AKLT Hamiltonian into energy levels separated by small gaps, for which we provide an explicit formula. This improves earlier results concerning the persistence of the so-called bulk gap in these models, besides illustrating the power of our general methods in a non-trivial application.
In this paper we study the low-lying spectrum of the AKLT model perturbed by small, finite-range potentials and with open boundary conditions imposed at the edges of the chain. Our analysis is based on the \emph{local, iterative Lie Schwinger block-diagonalization method} which allows us to control small interaction terms localized near the boundary of the chain that are responsible for the possible splitting of the ground-state energy of the AKLT Hamiltonian into energy levels separated by small gaps. This improves earlier results concerning the persistence of the so called \emph{bulk} gap in these models, besides illustrating the power of our general methods in a non-trivial application.
We begin by deriving bounds for the entanglement of a spin with an (adjacent and non-adjacent) interval of spins in an arbitrary pure Finitely Correlated States (FCS). The bounds we derive become exact in the case where one considers the entanglement of a single spin with a half-infinite chain to the right of it. Our result permits a more efficient calculation, numerically and in some cases even analytically, of the entanglement in arbitrary finitely correlated quantum spin chains. We continue the study of entanglement in the setting of ground states of Hamiltonians with a spectral gap. In particular, for
V a finite subset of
Zd, we let
HV denote a Hamiltonian on
V with finite range, finite strength interactions and a unique ground state with a non-vanishing spectral gap. For a density matrix
ρA that describes the finite-volume restriction to a region
A of the unique ground state, we provide a detailed version of a proof by M. Hastings, that the entropy of
ρA is bounded by a uniform constant
C. Moreover, we provide a detailed generalization of the 1-dimensional construction of Hastings' approximation to the ground state in dimensions 2 and higher. Finally, we turn our attention to the study of a conjecture central to Quantum Information Theory, the multiplicativity of the maximal output Schatten
p-norm of quantum channels, for
p>1. In particular, we study the output 2-norm for a special class of quantum channels, the depolarized Werner-Holevo channels, and show that multiplicativity holds for a product of two identical channels in this class.