We bound the error in ground-state expectations of local observables caused by truncating the spatial tails of a gapped quantum lattice Hamiltonian. We show that the error is controlled by the interaction strength discarded near each site, rather than by the extensive norm of the omitted Hamiltonian. If the gap remains open along a path that removes the interaction tail, the resulting bounds are uniform in system size and extend, under suitable assumptions, to thermodynamic-limit ground states. The convergence rate reflects the decay of the interaction tail: it is algebraic for power-law interactions, superpolynomial for superpolynomial interactions, and exponential at any strictly smaller rate for exponentially decaying interactions. For superpolynomial interactions, we also derive a direct infinite-volume estimate using automorphic equivalence. The results extend to isolated low-energy sectors and parity-even fermionic systems. For two-body interactions decaying as $r^{-p}$ in $d$ dimensions, we prove an error bound $O(R^{-(p-d)})$ for $p>2d$, where $R$ is the truncation range. We construct a gapped non-translation-invariant example that saturates this scaling, showing that the bound is optimal for the general class considered. Our results quantify when finite-range truncations faithfully reproduce the local physics of gapped long-range systems.
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22 pages main text and 13 pages appendix, 2 figures
We bound the error in ground-state expectations of local observables caused by truncating the spatial tails of a gapped quantum lattice Hamiltonian. We show that the error is controlled by the interaction strength discarded near each site, rather than by the extensive norm of the omitted Hamiltonian. If the gap remains open along a path that removes the interaction tail, the resulting bounds are uniform in system size and extend, under suitable assumptions, to thermodynamic-limit ground states. The convergence rate reflects the decay of the interaction tail: it is algebraic for power-law interactions, superpolynomial for superpolynomial interactions, and exponential at any strictly smaller rate for exponentially decaying interactions. For superpolynomial interactions, we also derive a direct infinite-volume estimate using automorphic equivalence. The results extend to isolated low-energy sectors and parity-even fermionic systems. For two-body interactions decaying as r−p in d dimensions, we prove an error bound O(R−(p−d)) for p>2d, where R is the truncation range. We construct a gapped non-translation-invariant example that saturates this scaling, showing that the bound is optimal for the general class considered. Our results quantify when finite-range truncations faithfully reproduce the local physics of gapped long-range systems.
We consider bulk-gapped fermion systems whose infinite-volume bulk is obtained by adding sufficiently weak even many-body interactions to a free Hamiltonian with spectral gap g>0, allowing polynomial spatial decay of both parts. We prove quantitative local determination of low-energy states: whenever another interaction agrees with the bulk interaction inside a finite or infinite region U, with bulk terms crossing its boundary unchanged or removed, all its states with excitation energies in [0,3g/4] have local expectations close to those of the bulk ground state deep inside U. The error decays with the distance to the complement of U, independently of the interaction terms supported outside U and of the chosen low-energy state.
Quantitative local determination has strong consequences. (i) The bulk interaction has a unique algebraic ground state. (ii) A strong "local perturbations perturb locally" (LPPL) principle holds: arbitrary distant defects change local ground-state expectations only by a spatially decaying error. (iii) Low-energy excitations in finite samples remain localized near the boundary for all times, up to spatially decaying tails, uniformly over arbitrary even boundary terms. (iv) Correlations from deep inside U to outside U are small, with quantitative bounds in terms of spatial separation and distance to Uc.
To prove local determination of low-energy states, we combine quasi-adiabatic transport of the free ground state to the interacting bulk ground state with a new condition, local excitation detectability (LED). A companion paper establishes gap stability and constructs the transport for weak interactions, while we prove LED at sufficiently weak coupling. The abstract theorem is nonperturbative and applies whenever the transport and LED hypotheses hold.
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.
Finite-size errors (FSEs), the discrepancies between an observable in a finite system and in the thermodynamic limit, are ubiquitous in numerical simulations of quantum many-body systems.Although a rough estimate of these errors can be obtained from a sequence of finite-size results, a strict, quantitative bound on the magnitude of FSE is still missing.Here we derive rigorous upper bounds on the FSE of local observables in real-time quantum dynamics simulations initialized from a product state.In d-dimensional locally interacting systems with a finite local Hilbert space, our bound implies | Ŝ(t ) L -Ŝ(t ) ∞ | C(2vt/L) cL-μ , with v, C, c, μ constants independent of L and t, which we compute explicitly.For periodic boundary conditions (PBCs), the constant c is twice as large as that for open boundary conditions (OBCs), suggesting that PBCs have smaller FSEs than OBCs at early times.The bound can be generalized to a large class of correlated initial states as well.As a byproduct, we prove that the FSE of local observables in ground-state simulations decays exponentially with L under a suitable spectral gap condition.Our bounds are practically useful in determining the validity of finite-size results, as we demonstrate in simulations of the one-dimensional (1D) quantum Ising and Fermi-Hubbard models.
We prove that generic quantum local Hamiltonians are gapless. In fact, we prove that there is a continuous density of states above the ground state. The Hamiltonian can be on a lattice in any spatial dimension or on a graph with a bounded maximum vertex degree. The type of interactions allowed for include translational invariance in a disorder (i.e., probabilistic) sense with some assumptions on the local distributions. Examples include many-body localization and random spin models. We calculate the scaling of the gap with the system's size when the local terms are distributed according to a Gaussian β orthogonal random matrix ensemble. As a corollary, there exist finite size partitions with respect to which the ground state is arbitrarily close to a product state. When the local eigenvalue distribution is discrete, in addition to the lack of an energy gap in the limit, we prove that the ground state has finite size degeneracies. The proofs are simple and constructive. This work excludes the important class of truly translationally invariant Hamiltonians where the local terms are all equal.
It has been proved that in gapped ground states of locally interacting lattice quantum systems with a finite local Hilbert space, the effect of local perturbations decays exponentially with distance.However, in systems with power-law-(1/r α ) decaying interactions, no analogous statement has been shown and there are serious mathematical obstacles to proving it with existing methods.In this paper, we prove that when α exceeds the spatial dimension D, the effect of local perturbations on local properties a distance r away is upper bounded by a power law 1/r α 1 in gapped ground states, provided that the perturbations do not close the spectral gap.The power-law exponent α 1 is tight if α > 2D and interactions are two-body, where we have α 1 = α.The proof is enabled by a method that avoids the use of quasiadiabatic continuation and incorporates techniques of complex analysis.This method also improves bounds on ground-state correlation decay, even in short-range interacting systems.Our work generalizes the fundamental notion that local perturbations have local effects to power-law interacting systems, with broad implications for numerical simulations and experiments.
We establish an exponentially decaying upper bound on the average energy that can be extracted in quantum energy teleportation (QET) protocols executed on finite-range {gapped} lattice systems possessing a unique ground state. Under mild regularity assumptions on the Hamiltonian and uniform operator-norm bounds on the local measurement operators, there exist positive constants C and μ (determined by the spectral gap, interaction range and local operator norms) such that for any local measurement performed in a region A and any outcome-dependent local unitaries implemented in a disjoint region B separated by distance d=dist(A,B) one has ∣EA−EB∣≤Ce−μd. The bound is nonperturbative, explicit up to model-dependent constants, and follows from the variational characterization of the ground state combined with exponential clustering implied by the spectral gap. We emphasize that the constants deteriorate as the gap closes (equivalently, as the correlation length diverges), so the estimate is intended for the gapped regime.