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arXiv:2607.21798

Spectral Gap of the Davies Generator for the Mean-Field Heisenberg Model

Joao Basso, Thiago Bergamaschi, Lin Lin, Michael Ragone, Kevin D. Stubbs

quant-phmath-phSubmitted Jul 23, 2026• Announced Jul 27, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

The mean-field Heisenberg ferromagnet is a quantum spin model on the complete graph with isotropic spin-1/2 interactions. This non-commuting Hamiltonian is permutation and $\mathsf{SU}(2)$ invariant, and its Gibbs states undergo an $\mathsf{SU}(2)$ symmetry breaking phase transition at inverse temperature $β=2$. We consider the associated Davies generator, a canonical model of open-system thermalization, and prove tight asymptotic estimates for its spectral gap at all noncritical temperatures. For fixed $β<2$, the gap as a function of number of qubits $n$ is $Θ(1)$, while for fixed $β>2$ the gap is $Θ(n^{-1})$. The matching upper bound of the spectral gap is witnessed by the total magnetization order parameter, suggesting that the low-temperature ($β>2$) slowdown is associated with broken continuous symmetry. Two key ingredients in our approach are a comparison argument, which introduces auxiliary generators to bound dissipation on nontrivial representations of the symmetry groups $\mathsf{SU}(2)$ and $\mathsf{S}_n$, and a decomposition of the space of observables into spherical tensor operators to reveal a form of monotonicity.

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63 pages, 1 figure

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Despite extensive study, our understanding of quantum Markov chains remains far less complete than that of their classical counterparts. [Temme'13] observed that the Davies Lindbladian, a well-studied model of quantum Markov dynamics, contains an embedded classical Markov generator, raising the natural question of how the convergence properties of the quantum and classical dynamics are related. While [Temme'13] showed that the spectral gap of the Davies Lindbladian can be much smaller than that of the embedded classical generator for certain highly structured Hamiltonians, we show that if the spectrum of the Hamiltonian does not contain long arithmetic progressions, then the two spectral gaps must be comparable. As a consequence, we prove that for a large class of Hamiltonians, including those obtained by perturbing a fixed Hamiltonian with a generic external field, the quantum spectral gap remains within a constant factor of the classical spectral gap. Our result aligns with physical intuition and enables the application of classical Markov chain techniques to the quantum setting. The proof is based on showing that any ``off-diagonal'' eigenvector of the Davies generator can be used to construct an observable which commutes with the Hamiltonian and has a Lindbladian Rayleigh quotient which can be upper bounded in terms of that of the original eigenvector's Lindbladian Rayleigh quotient. Thus, a spectral gap for such observables implies a spectral gap for the full Davies generator.