Abstract We study the stability with respect to a broad class of perturbations of gapped ground-state phases of quantum spin systems defined by frustration-free Hamiltonians. The core result of this work is a proof using the Bravyi–Hastings–Michalakis (BHM) strategy that under a condition of local topological quantum order (LTQO), the bulk gap is stable under perturbations that decay at long distances faster than a stretched exponential. Compared to previous work, we expand the class of frustration-free quantum spin models that can be handled to include models with more general boundary conditions, and models with discrete symmetry breaking. Detailed estimates allow us to formulate sufficient conditions for the validity of positive lower bounds for the gap that are uniform in the system size and that are explicit to some degree. We provide a survey of the BHM strategy following the approach of Michalakis and Zwolak, with alterations introduced to accommodate more general than just periodic boundary conditions and more general lattices. We express the fundamental condition known as LTQO by means of an indistinguishability radius, which we introduce. Using the uniform finite-volume results, we then proceed to study the thermodynamic limit. We first study the case of a unique limiting ground state and then also consider models with spontaneous breaking of a discrete symmetry. In the latter case, LTQO cannot hold for all local observables. However, for perturbations that preserve the symmetry, we show stability of the gap and the structure of the broken symmetry phases. We prove that the GNS Hamiltonian associated with each pure state has a non-zero spectral gap above the ground state.
An important class of models studied in quantum statistical mechanics consists of frustration-free interactions whose Hamiltonians exhibit a gap in the spectrum above their ground state energies. This paper discusses recent techniques which dramatically extend the class of models to which stability applies when the perturbations exhibit stretched exponential decay at long distances. We consider a class of initial models satisfying an assumption that prevents splitting of the ground state space. This assumption on the structure on the ground state space is referred to as local topological quantum order. A key tool in our analysis is the quasi-local unitary spectral flow automorphism which allows us to decompose the perturbed Hamiltonian into a perturbation model satisfying a relative form bound. We will present a result for the stability of frustration-free, one-dimensional models of this type in the form of an estimate uniform in the system size. We also present additional conditions ensuring the existence of a pure perturbed ground state whose GNS Hamiltonian remains gapped. As an application, we evaluate the stability of the Heisenberg XXZ spin-1/2 chain. Our work shows a new result on the stability of the XXZ model for perturbations respecting a local gauge symmetry and the stability above the translation invariant ground states in the thermodynamic limit. We also discuss challenges to additional conjectured stability results for the XXZ model.
We prove that weak long-range many-body interactions preserve the bulk gap of a free fermion system and that a quasi-local spectral flow transports the free ground state to ground states of the interacting system. Let
Φh be a free fermionic interaction, possibly including pairing terms, whose infinite-volume Majorana coefficient operator
h has no spectrum in
(−g,g), and let
V be an even self-adjoint many-body interaction. For sufficiently small
∣λ∣, we construct pure ground states
ωλ of the interacting bulk system
Φλ=Φh+λV and quasi-local automorphisms
β0,λ such that
ωλ=ω0∘β0,λ, where
ω0 is the free ground state of
Φh. Each
ωλ has a GNS Hamiltonian with gap at least
g−C∗∣λ∣∥V∥∗, where
∥⋅∥∗ is the relevant interaction norm.
Our result allows polynomial decay of both the free coefficients and the many-body interaction. For two-site interactions on a uniformly discrete point set
Γ⊂Rd, a sufficient condition is decay as
(1+∣x−y∣)−ϖ with
ϖ>2d, for both the hopping and pairing coefficients and the interaction terms. The spectral-flow generator preserves the spatial exponent of the polynomial interaction norm, and its automorphisms satisfy locality bounds at that exponent. If
h and
V have stretched-exponential decay, so does the spectral-flow generator.
The proof constructs the spectral flow and establishes the gap through an excitation-number comparison, using polynomial propagation bounds for evolved interactions proved in a companion paper.
We generalize the proof of stability of topological order, due to Bravyi, Hastings, and Michalakis, to stabilizer Hamiltonians corresponding to low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes without the restriction of geometric locality in Euclidean space. We consider Hamiltonians H 0 defined by ⟦ N , K , d ⟧ LDPC codes, which obey certain topological quantum order conditions: (i) code distance d ≥ c log ( N ) , implying local indistinguishability of ground states, and (ii) a mild condition on local and global compatibility of ground states—these include good quantum LDPC codes and the toric code on a hyperbolic lattice, among others. We consider stability under weak perturbations that are quasilocal on the interaction graph defined by H 0 and that can be represented as sums of bounded-norm terms. As long as the local perturbation strength is smaller than a finite constant, we show that the perturbed Hamiltonian has well-defined spectral bands originating from the O ( 1 ) smallest eigenvalues of H 0 . The band originating from the smallest eigenvalue has 2 K states, is separated from the rest of the spectrum by a finite energy gap, and has exponentially narrow bandwidth δ = C N e − Θ ( d ) , which is tighter than the best-known bounds even in the Euclidean case. We also obtain that the new ground-state subspace is related to the initial-code subspace by a quasilocal unitary, allowing one to relate their physical properties. Our proof uses an iterative procedure that performs successive rotations to eliminate non-frustration-free terms in the Hamiltonian. Our results extend to quantum Hamiltonians built from classical LDPC codes, which give rise to stable symmetry-breaking phases. These results show that LDPC codes very generally define stable gapped quantum phases, even in the non-Euclidean setting, initiating a systematic study of such phases of matter.
We prove that the ground state of the AKLT models on the hexagonal lattice and the Lieb lattice satisfy the local topological quantum order (LTQO) condition. This will be a consequence of proving that the finite volume ground states are indistinguishable from a unique infinite volume ground state. Concretely, we identify a sequence of increasing and absorbing finite volumes for which any finite volume ground state expectation is well approximated by the infinite volume state with error decaying at a uniform exponential rate in the distance between the support of the observable and boundary of the finite volume. As a corollary to the LTQO property, we obtain that the spectral gap above the ground state in these models is stable under general small perturbations of sufficient decay. We prove these results by a detailed analysis of the polymer representation of the ground states state derived by Kennedy, Lieb and Tasaki (1988) with the necessary modifications required for proving the strong form of ground state indistinguishability needed for LTQO.
A gapped ground state of a quantum spin system has a natural length scale set by the gap. This length scale governs the decay of correlations. A common intuition is that this length scale also controls the spatial relaxation towards the ground state away from impurities or boundaries. The aim of this article is to take a step towards a proof of this intuition. We assume that the ground state is frustration-free and invertible, i.e. it has no long-range entanglement. Moreover, we assume the property that we are aiming to prove for one specific kind of boundary condition; namely open boundary conditions. This assumption is also known as the "local topological quantum order" (LTQO) condition. With these assumptions we can prove stretched exponential decay away from boundaries or impurities, for any of the ground states of the perturbed system. In contrast to most earlier results, we do not assume that the perturbations at the boundary or the impurity are small. In particular, the perturbed system itself can have long-range entanglement.