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arXiv:2601.00111

A compellingly simple proof of the speed of sound for interacting bosons

J. Eisert

quant-phcond-mat.othermath-phSubmitted Dec 31, 2025• Announced Jan 2, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

On physical grounds, one expects locally interacting quantum many-body systems to feature a finite group velocity. This intuition is rigorously underpinned by Lieb-Robinson bounds that state that locally interacting Hamiltonians with finite-dimensional constituents on suitably regular lattices always exhibit such a finite group velocity. This also implies that causality is always respected by the dynamics of quantum lattice models. It had been a long-standing open question whether interacting bosonic systems also feature finite speeds of sound in information and particle propagation, which was only recently resolved. This work proves a strikingly simple such bound for particle propagation - shown in literally a few elementary, yet not straightforward, lines - for generalized Bose-Hubbard models defined on general lattices, proving that appropriately locally perturbed stationary states feature a finite speed of sound in particle numbers.

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4 pages, 1 figure

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On physical grounds, one expects locally interacting quantum many-body systems to feature a finite group velocity. This intuition is rigorously underpinned by Lieb-Robinson bounds that state that locally interacting Hamiltonians with finite-dimensional constituents on suitably regular lattices always exhibit such a finite group velocity. This also implies that causality is always respected by the dynamics of quantum lattice models. It had been a long-standing open question whether interacting bosonic systems also feature finite speeds of sound in information and particle propagation, which was only recently resolved. This work proves a strikingly simple such bound for particle propagation - shown in literally a few elementary, yet not straightforward, lines - for generalized Bose-Hubbard models defined on general lattices, proving that appropriately locally perturbed stationary states feature a finite speed of sound in particle numbers.
The Lieb-Robinson bound asserts the existence of a maximal propagation speed for the quantum dynamics of lattice spin systems. Such general bounds are not available for most bosonic lattice gases due to their unbounded local interactions. Here we establish for the first time a general ballistic upper bound on macroscopic particle transport in the paradigmatic Bose-Hubbard model. The bound is the first to cover a broad class of initial states with positive density including Mott states, which resolves a longstanding open problem. It applies to Bose-Hubbard-type models on any lattice with not too long-ranged hopping. The proof is rigorous and rests on controlling the time evolution of a new kind of adiabatic spacetime localization observable via iterative differential inequalities.
We prove that quantum information propagates with a finite velocity in any model of interacting bosons whose (possibly time-dependent) Hamiltonian contains spatially local single-boson hopping terms along with arbitrary local density-dependent interactions.More precisely, with the density matrix ρ ∝ exp½-μN (with N the total boson number), ensemble-averaged correlators of the form h½A 0 ; B r ðtÞi, along with outof-time-ordered correlators, must vanish as the distance r between two local operators grows, unless t ≥ r=v for some finite speed v.In one-dimensional models, we give a useful extension of this result that demonstrates the smallness of all matrix elements of the commutator ½A 0 ; B r ðtÞ between finite-density states if t=r is sufficiently small.Our bounds are relevant for physically realistic initial conditions in experimentally realized models of interacting bosons.In particular, we prove that v can scale no faster than linear in number density in the Bose-Hubbard model: This scaling matches previous results in the highdensity limit.The quantum-walk formalism underlying our proof provides an alternative method for bounding quantum dynamics in models with unbounded operators and infinite-dimensional Hilbert spaces, where Lieb-Robinson bounds have been notoriously challenging to prove.
Spin systems with exponentially decaying k-body interactions have an effective finite group velocity for the propagation of correlations due to Lieb-Robinson bounds. We show that a finite group velocity conversely implies the locality of the underlying Hamiltonian: a system fulfills Lieb-Robinson bounds in exponential form if and only if the underlying interactions decay exponentially in space. Our result already follows from the behaviour of two-point correlation functions for single-site observables and generalizes to different decay behaviours. As a side-result, we thus find that Lieb-Robinson bounds for single-site observables imply Lieb-Robinson bounds for arbitrary bounded observables. In addition we show that our results generalize to fermionic lattice models.
In this work, we investigate how quickly local perturbations propagate in interacting boson systems with Bose-Hubbard-type Hamiltonians. In general, these systems have unbounded local energies, and arbitrarily fast information propagation may occur. We focus on a specific but experimentally natural situation in which the number of bosons at any one site in the unperturbed initial state is approximately limited. We rigorously prove the existence of an almost-linear information-propagation light cone, thus establishing a Lieb-Robinson bound: the wave front grows at most as t log^{2}(t). We prove the clustering theorem for gapped ground states and study the time complexity of classically simulating one-dimensional quench dynamics, a topic of great practical interest.
We review recent progress on state-dependent Lieb--Robinson bounds for Bose--Hubbard Hamiltonians. In particular, Kuwahara, Vu, and Saito established that, for general bounded-density initial states, the Lieb--Robinson velocity is bounded by td−1t^{d-1}td−1 for large times, where ddd denotes the lattice dimension. We present a shorter proof of the weaker, but still polynomial velocity bound td+εt^{d+ε}td+ε.
We review the mathematical speed limits on quantum information processing in many-body systems. After the proof of the Lieb-Robinson Theorem in 1972, the past two decades have seen substantial developments in its application to other questions, such as the simulatability of quantum systems on classical or quantum computers, the generation of entanglement, and even the properties of ground states of gapped systems. Moreover, Lieb-Robinson bounds have been extended in non-trivial ways, to demonstrate speed limits in systems with power-law interactions or interacting bosons, and even to prove notions of locality that arise in cartoon models for quantum gravity with all-to-all interactions. We overview the progress which has occurred, highlight the most promising results and techniques, and discuss some central outstanding questions which remain open. To help bring newcomers to the field up to speed, we provide self-contained proofs of the field's most essential results.