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arXiv:1903.00108 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Gaplessness is not generic for translation-invariant spin chains

Marius Lemm

Published Jul 15, 2019• 11 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The existence of a spectral gap above the ground state has far-reaching consequences for the low-energy physics of a quantum many-body system. A recent work of Movassagh [R. Movassagh, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 220504 (2017)] shows that a spatially random local quantum Hamiltonian is generically gapless. Here we observe that a gap is more common for translation-invariant quantum spin chains, more specifically, that these are gapped with a positive probability if the interaction is of small rank. This is in line with a previous analysis of the spin-$1/2$ case by Bravyi and Gosset [S. Bravyi and D. Gosset, J. Math. Phys. 56, 061902 (2015)]. The Hamiltonians are constructed by selecting a single projection of sufficiently small rank at random and then translating it across the entire chain. By the rank assumption, the resulting Hamiltonians are automatically frustration-free and this fact plays a key role in our analysis.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.100.035113

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The existence of a spectral gap above the ground state has far-reaching consequences for the low-energy physics of a quantum many-body system. A recent work of Movassagh [R. Movassagh, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 220504 (2017)] shows that a spatially random local quantum Hamiltonian is generically gapless. Here we observe that a gap is more common for translation-invariant quantum spin chains, more specifically, that these are gapped with a positive probability if the interaction is of small rank. This is in line with a previous analysis of the spin-1/21/21/2 case by Bravyi and Gosset [S. Bravyi and D. Gosset, J. Math. Phys. 56, 061902 (2015)]. The Hamiltonians are constructed by selecting a single projection of sufficiently small rank at random and then translating it across the entire chain. By the rank assumption, the resulting Hamiltonians are automatically frustration-free and this fact plays a key role in our analysis.
We consider random translation-invariant frustration-free quantum spin Hamiltonians on ZD in which the nearest-neighbor interaction in every direction is randomly sampled and then distributed across the lattice. Our main result is that, under a small rank constraint, the Hamiltonians are automatically frustration-free and they are gapped with a positive probability. This extends previous results on 1D spin chains to all dimensions. The argument additionally controls the local gap. As an application, we obtain a 2D area law for a cut-dependent ground state via recent AGSP methods of Anshu-Arad-Gosset.
We consider a family of translation-invariant quantum spin chains with nearest-neighbor interactions and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for these systems to be gapped in the thermodynamic limit. More precisely, let ψψψ be an arbitrary two-qubit state. We consider a chain of nnn qubits with open boundary conditions and Hamiltonian Hn(ψ)H_n(ψ)Hn​(ψ) which is defined as the sum of rank-1 projectors onto ψψψ applied to consecutive pairs of qubits. We show that the spectral gap of Hn(ψ)H_n(ψ)Hn​(ψ) is upper bounded by 1/(n−1)1/(n-1)1/(n−1) if the eigenvalues of a certain two-by-two matrix simply related to ψψψ have equal non-zero absolute value. Otherwise, the spectral gap is lower bounded by a positive constant independent of nnn (depending only on ψψψ). A key ingredient in the proof is a new operator inequality for the ground space projector which expresses a monotonicity under the partial trace. This monotonicity property appears to be very general and might be interesting in its own right. As an extension of our main result, we obtain a complete classification of gapped and gapless phases of frustration-free translation-invariant spin-1/2 chains with nearest-neighbor interactions.
We prove that generic quantum local Hamiltonians are gapless. In fact, we prove that there is a continuous density of states above the ground state. The Hamiltonian can be on a lattice in any spatial dimension or on a graph with a bounded maximum vertex degree. The type of interactions allowed for include translational invariance in a disorder (i.e., probabilistic) sense with some assumptions on the local distributions. Examples include many-body localization and random spin models. We calculate the scaling of the gap with the system's size when the local terms are distributed according to a Gaussian β orthogonal random matrix ensemble. As a corollary, there exist finite size partitions with respect to which the ground state is arbitrarily close to a product state. When the local eigenvalue distribution is discrete, in addition to the lack of an energy gap in the limit, we prove that the ground state has finite size degeneracies. The proofs are simple and constructive. This work excludes the important class of truly translationally invariant Hamiltonians where the local terms are all equal.
We consider a family of translation-invariant quantum spin chains with nearest-neighbor interactions and derive necessary and sufficient conditions for these systems to be gapped in the thermodynamic limit. More precisely, let ψ be an arbitrary two-qubit state. We consider a chain of n qubits with open boundary conditions and Hamiltonian Hn(ψ) which is defined as the sum of rank-1 projectors onto ψ applied to consecutive pairs of qubits. We show that the spectral gap of Hn(ψ) is upper bounded by 1/(n − 1) if the eigenvalues of a certain 2 × 2 matrix simply related to ψ have equal non-zero absolute value. Otherwise, the spectral gap is lower bounded by a positive constant independent of n (depending only on ψ). A key ingredient in the proof is a new operator inequality for the ground space projector which expresses a monotonicity under the partial trace. This monotonicity property appears to be very general and might be interesting in its own right. As an extension of our main result, we obtain a complete classification of gapped and gapless phases of frustration-free translation-invariant spin-1/2 chains with nearest-neighbor interactions.
We improve Knabe’s spectral gap bound for frustration-free translation-invariant local Hamiltonians in 1D. The bound is based on a relationship between global and local gaps. The global gap is the spectral gap of a size-m chain with periodic boundary conditions, while the local gap is that of a subchain of size n < m with open boundary conditions. Knabe proved that if the local gap is larger than the threshold value 1/(n − 1) for some n > 2, then the global gap is lower bounded by a positive constant in the thermodynamic limit m → ∞. Here we improve the threshold to 6n(n+1), which is better (smaller) for all n > 3 and which is asymptotically optimal. As a corollary we establish a surprising fact about 1D translation-invariant frustration-free systems that are gapless in the thermodynamic limit: for any such system the spectral gap of a size-n chain with open boundary conditions is upper bounded as O(n−2). This contrasts with gapless frustrated systems where the gap can be Θ(n−1). It also limits the extent to which the area law is violated in these frustration-free systems, since it implies that the half-chain entanglement entropy is O(1/ϵ) as a function of spectral gap ϵ. We extend our results to frustration-free systems on a 2D square lattice.
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.