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arXiv:2208.02620 · SciPost Physics Core

Quantum adiabaticity in many-body systems and almost-orthogonality in complementary subspace

Jyong-Hao Chen, Vadim Cheianov

Published Nov 12, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

We investigate why, in quantum many-body systems, the adiabatic fidelity and the overlap between the initial state and instantaneous ground states often yield nearly identical values. Our analysis suggests that this phenomenon results from an interplay between two intrinsic limits of many-body systems: the limit of small evolution parameters and the limit of large system sizes. In the former case, conventional perturbation theory provides a straightforward explanation. In the latter case, a key insight is that pairs of vectors in the Hilbert space orthogonal to the initial state tend to become nearly orthogonal as the system size increases. We illustrate these general findings with two representative models of driven many-body systems: the driven Rice-Mele model and the driven interacting Kitaev chain model.

DOI
10.21468/scipostphyscore.8.4.084

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We investigate why, in quantum many-body systems, the adiabatic fidelity and the overlap between the initial state and instantaneous ground states often yield nearly identical values. Our analysis suggests that this phenomenon results from an interplay between two intrinsic limits of many-body systems: the limit of small evolution parameters and the limit of large system sizes. In the former case, conventional perturbation theory provides a straightforward explanation. In the latter case, a key insight is that pairs of vectors in the Hilbert space orthogonal to the initial state tend to become nearly orthogonal as the system size increases. We illustrate these general findings with two representative models of driven many-body systems: the driven Rice-Mele model and the driven interacting Kitaev chain model.
We provide two inequalities for estimating adiabatic fidelity in terms of two other more handily calculated quantities, i.e., generalized orthogonality catastrophe and quantum speed limit. As a result of considering a two-dimensional subspace spanned by the initial ground state and its orthogonal complement, our method leads to stronger bounds on adiabatic fidelity than those previously obtained. One of the two inequalities is nearly sharp when the system size is large, as illustrated using a driven Rice-Mele model, which represents a broad class of quantum many-body systems whose overlap of different instantaneous ground states exhibits orthogonality catastrophe.
The adiabatic theorem is a fundamental result in quantum mechanics, which states that a system can be kept arbitrarily close to the instantaneous ground state of its Hamiltonian if the latter varies in time slowly enough. The theorem has an impressive record of applications ranging from foundations of quantum field theory to computational molecular dynamics. In light of this success it is remarkable that a practicable quantitative understanding of what "slowly enough" means is limited to a modest set of systems mostly having a small Hilbert space. Here we show how this gap can be bridged for a broad natural class of physical systems, namely, many-body systems where a small move in the parameter space induces an orthogonality catastrophe. In this class, the conditions for adiabaticity are derived from the scaling properties of the parameter-dependent ground state without a reference to the excitation spectrum. This finding constitutes a major simplification of a complex problem, which otherwise requires solving nonautonomous time evolution in a large Hilbert space.
Establishing quantitative adiabaticity criteria at finite temperature remains substantially less developed than in the pure-state setting, even though realistic quantum systems are never at absolute zero. Here, by combining a mixed-state quantum speed limit with mixed-state fidelity susceptibility within the Liouville-space formulation of quantum mechanics, we derive rigorous bounds on the Hilbert-Schmidt fidelity between mixed states. Focusing on protocols that drive an initial Gibbs state toward a quasi-Gibbs target, these bounds yield an explicit threshold driving rate for the onset of nonadiabaticity. For a broad class of local Hamiltonians in gapped phases, we show that, in the thermodynamic limit, the threshold driving rate factorizes into a system-size contribution that recovers the zero-temperature scaling and a universal temperature-dependent factor. The latter is exponentially close to unity at low temperature, whereas at high temperature it is linear in temperature. We verify the predicted scaling in several spin-1/2 chains by obtaining closed-form expressions for the threshold driving rate. Our results provide a practical and largely model-independent criterion for finite-temperature adiabaticity in driven many-body systems under closed-system unitary evolution.
The evolution of a driven quantum system is said to be adiabatic whenever the state of the system stays close to an instantaneous eigenstate of its time-dependent Hamiltonian. The celebrated quantum adiabatic theorem ensures that such pure state adiabaticity can be maintained with arbitrary accuracy, provided one chooses a small enough driving rate. Here, we extend the notion of quantum adiabaticity to closed quantum systems initially prepared at finite temperature. In this case adiabaticity implies that the (mixed) state of the system stays close to a quasi-Gibbs state diagonal in the basis of the instantaneous eigenstates of the Hamiltonian. We prove a sufficient condition for the finite temperature adiabaticity. Remarkably, it turns out that the finite temperature adiabaticity can be more robust than the pure state adiabaticity with respect to increasing the system size. This can be the case for one-body systems with large Hilbert spaces, such as a particle in a large box, as well as for certain many-body systems. In particular, we present an example of a driven many-body system where, in the thermodynamic limit, the finite temperature adiabaticity is maintained, while the pure state adiabaticity breaks down. On the other hand, for generic many-body systems the scaling of the finite temperature adiabatic condition with the system size is exponential, analogously to pure state adiabatic conditions.
The quantum adiabatic theorem states that a driven system can be kept arbitrarily close to the instantaneous eigenstate of its Hamiltonian if the latter varies in time slowly enough. When it comes to applying the adiabatic theorem in practice, the key question to be answered is how slow slowly enough is. This question can be an intricate one, especially for many-body systems, where the limits of slow driving and large system size may not commute. Recently we have shown how the quantum adiabaticity in many-body systems is related to the generalized orthogonality catastrophe [arXiv 1611.00663, to appear in Phys. Rev. Lett.]. We have proven a rigorous inequality relating these two phenomena and applied it to establish conditions for the quantized transport in the topological Thouless pump. In the present contribution we (i) review these developments and (ii) apply the inequality to establish the conditions for adiabaticity in a one-dimensional system consisting of a quantum fluid and an impurity particle pulled through the fluid by an external force. The latter analysis is vital for the correct quantitative description of the phenomenon of quasi-Bloch oscillations in a one-dimensional translation invariant impurity-fluid system.