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arXiv:2401.10147 · Journal of Statistical Physics

Strong Decay of Correlations for Gibbs States in Any Dimension

Andreas Blühm, Ángela Capel, Antonio Pérez

Published Sep 29, 2025• 3 citations
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Abstract

Abstract Quantum systems in thermal equilibrium are described using Gibbs states. The correlations in such states determine how difficult it is to describe or simulate them. In this article, we show that if the Gibbs state of a quantum system satisfies that each of its marginals admits a local effective Hamiltonian with short-range interactions, then it satisfies a mixing condition, that is, for any regions A , C the distance of the reduced state $$\rho _{AC}$$ ρ AC on these regions to the product of its marginals, $$ \left\| \rho _{AC} \rho _A^{-1} \otimes \rho _C^{-1} - \mathbbm {1}_{AC} \right\| \, , $$ ρ AC ρ A - 1 ⊗ ρ C - 1 - 1 AC , decays exponentially with the distance between regions A and C . This mixing condition is stronger than other commonly studied measures of correlation. In particular, it implies the exponential decay of the mutual information between distant regions. The mixing condition has been used, for example, to prove positive log-Sobolev constants. On the way, we prove that the the condition regarding local effective Hamiltonian is satisfied if the Hamiltonian only has commuting interactions which also commute with every marginal of their products. The proof of these results employs a variety of tools such as Araki’s expansionals, quantum belief propagation and cluster expansions.

DOI
10.1007/s10955-025-03512-y

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Abstract Quantum systems in thermal equilibrium are described using Gibbs states. The correlations in such states determine how difficult it is to describe or simulate them. In this article, we show that if the Gibbs state of a quantum system satisfies that each of its marginals admits a local effective Hamiltonian with short-range interactions, then it satisfies a mixing condition, that is, for any regions A , C the distance of the reduced state ρAC\rho _{AC}ρAC​ ρ AC on these regions to the product of its marginals, ∥ρACρA−1⊗ρC−1−\mathbbm1AC∥ ,\left\| \rho _{AC} \rho _A^{-1} \otimes \rho _C^{-1} - \mathbbm {1}_{AC} \right\| \, ,​ρAC​ρA−1​⊗ρC−1​−\mathbbm1AC​​, ρ AC ρ A - 1 ⊗ ρ C - 1 - 1 AC , decays exponentially with the distance between regions A and C . This mixing condition is stronger than other commonly studied measures of correlation. In particular, it implies the exponential decay of the mutual information between distant regions. The mixing condition has been used, for example, to prove positive log-Sobolev constants. On the way, we prove that the the condition regarding local effective Hamiltonian is satisfied if the Hamiltonian only has commuting interactions which also commute with every marginal of their products. The proof of these results employs a variety of tools such as Araki’s expansionals, quantum belief propagation and cluster expansions.
The thermal equilibrium properties of physical systems can be described using Gibbs states. It is therefore of great interest to know when such states allow for an easy description. In particular, this is the case if correlations between distant regions are small. In this work, we consider 1D quantum spin systems with local, finite-range, translation-invariant interactions at any temperature. In this setting, we show that Gibbs states satisfy uniform exponential decay of correlations and, moreover, the mutual information between two regions decays exponentially with their distance, irrespective of the temperature. In order to prove the latter, we show that exponential decay of correlations of the infinite-chain thermal states, exponential uniform clustering and exponential decay of the mutual information are equivalent for 1D quantum spin systems with local, finite-range interactions at any temperature. In particular, Araki's seminal results yields that the three conditions hold in the translation-invariant case. The methods we use are based on the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy and on techniques developed by Araki. Moreover, we find that the Gibbs states of the systems we consider are superexponentially close to saturating the data-processing inequality for the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy.
The Markov property entails the conditional independence structure inherent in Gibbs distributions for general classical Hamiltonians, a feature that plays a crucial role in inference, mixing time analysis, and algorithm design. However, much less is known about quantum Gibbs states. In this work, we show that for any Hamiltonian with a bounded interaction degree, the quantum Gibbs state is locally Markov at arbitrary temperature, meaning there exists a quasi-local recovery map for every local region. Notably, this recovery map is obtained by applying a detailed-balanced Lindbladian with jumps acting on the region. Consequently, we prove that (i) the conditional mutual information (CMI) for a shielded small region decays exponentially with the shielding distance, and (ii) under the assumption of uniform clustering of correlations, Gibbs states of general non-commuting Hamiltonians on DDD-dimensional lattices can be prepared by a quantum circuit of depth eO(log⁡D(n/ε))e^{O(\log^D(n/ε))}eO(logD(n/ε)), which can be further reduced assuming certain local gap condition. Our proofs introduce a regularization scheme for imaginary-time-evolved operators at arbitrarily low temperatures and reveal a connection between the Dirichlet form, a dynamic quantity, and the commutator in the KMS inner product, a static quantity. We believe these tools pave the way for tackling further challenges in quantum thermodynamics and mixing times, particularly in low-temperature regimes.
The classification of mixed-state phases requires criteria beyond two-point correlation functions, such as the decay of the mutual information (MI) and the conditional mutual information (CMI), with the latter encapsulated in the notion of Markov length. Here we show how such static properties of the fixed point of a Lindbladian follow from natural dynamical features of its generators: rapid mixing and frustration-freeness. We focus on systems with long-range interactions, and prove (i) that local Lindbladians satisfying (global) rapid mixing and frustration-freeness have fixed-points whose CMI decays with the shielding distance, and (ii) that (local) rapid mixing together with primitivity and regularity implies global decay of MI. For long-range interactions decaying with a power law with rate ααα, both quantities decay polynomially rather than exponentially, in contrast to the finite- and short-range regimes where exponential decay (a finite Markov length) is expected within a phase. We further show that Gibbs states of long-range, non-commuting Hamiltonians satisfy a local Markov property at any temperatures, extending the recent results (Chen--Rouzé, 2025) for short-range systems to the long-range regime relevant to a variety of experimental platforms. As a numerical example, we study the long-range Ising model both with and without a transverse field. We find regimes in which the polynomial decay of the CMI holds, in accordance with the bounds proven.
We establish improved locally Markovian properties of quantum Gibbs states at every fixed positive temperature. For finite-range interactions of bounded interaction degree, the conditional mutual information (CMI) decays exponentially with separation, with a prefactor exponential in the boundary size of only one of the two regions and independent of the size of the other region and the total system. This improves the exponential volume dependence of the local Markov bounds established by Chen and Rouzé \cite{Chen2025}. For exponentially and stretched-exponentially decaying interactions, we obtain stretched-exponential CMI decay with a boundary-dependent prefactor. For power-law interactions, we prove inverse-logarithmic or algebraic decay with polynomial region-size dependence. Our proof is static, in contrast to the dynamical approach of Chen and Rouzé. We compare the Gibbs state with a product state obtained by removing boundary interactions, reducing the CMI bound to a relative-entropy loss that we control using locality estimates.
Abstract We show that whenever the Gibbs state of a quantum spin system satisfies decay of correlations, then it is stable, in the sense that local perturbations affect the Gibbs state only locally, and it satisfies local indistinguishability, i.e. it exhibits local insensitivity to system size. These implications hold in any dimension, require only locality of the Hamiltonian, and are based on Lieb–Robinson bounds and on a detailed analysis of the locality properties of the quantum belief propagation for Gibbs states. To demonstrate the versatility of our approach, we explicitly apply our results to several physically relevant models in which the decay of correlations is either known to hold or is proved by us. These include Gibbs states of one-dimensional spin chains with polynomially decaying interactions at any temperature, and high-temperature Gibbs states of quantum spin systems with finite-range interactions in any dimension. We also prove exponential decay of correlations above a threshold temperature for Gibbs states of one-dimensional finite spin chains with translation-invariant and exponentially decaying interactions, and then apply our general results.
Abstract We show that spin chains in thermal equilibrium have a correlation structure in which individual regions are strongly correlated at most with their near vicinity. We quantify this with alternative notions of the conditional mutual information, defined through the so-called Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy. We prove that these measures decay superexponentially at every positive temperature, under the assumption that the spin chain Hamiltonian is translation-invariant. Using a recovery map associated with these measures, we sequentially construct tensor network approximations in terms of marginals of small (sublogarithmic) size. As a main application, we show that classical representations of the states can be learned efficiently from local measurements with a polynomial sample complexity. We also prove an approximate factorization condition for the purity of the entire Gibbs state, which implies that it can be efficiently estimated to a small multiplicative error from a small number of local measurements. The results extend from strictly local to exponentially-decaying interactions above a threshold temperature, albeit only with exponential decay rates. As a technical step of independent interest, we show an upper bound to the decay of the Belavkin–Staszewski relative entropy upon the application of a conditional expectation.