Many-body localization was proven under realistic assumptions by constructing a quasi-local unitary rotation that diagonalizes the Hamiltonian (Imbrie, 2016). A natural generalization is to consider all unitaries that have a similar structure. We bound entanglement for states generated by such unitaries, thus providing an independent proof of area law in eigenstates of many-body localized systems. An error of approximating the unitary by a finite-depth local circuit is obtained. We connect the defined family of unitaries to other results about many-body localization (Kim et al, 2014), in particular Lieb-Robinson bound. Finally we argue that any Hamiltonian can be diagonalized by such a unitary, given it has a slow enough logarithmic lightcone in its Lieb-Robinson bound.
We consider questions posed in a recent paper of Mandayam et al. (2014) on the nature of “unextendible mutually unbiased bases.” We describe a conceptual framework to study these questions, using a connection proved by the author in Thas (2009) between the set of nonidentity generalized Pauli operators on the Hilbert space of N d-level quantum systems, d a prime, and the geometry of non-degenerate alternating bilinear forms of rank N over finite fields F d . We then supply alternative and short proofs of results obtained in Mandayam et al. (2014), as well as new general bounds for the problems considered in loc. cit. In this setting, we also solve Conjecture 1 of Mandayam et al. (2014) and speculate on variations of this conjecture.
The generalized quantum Stein's lemma provides an explicit expression for the optimal error exponent when distinguishing many independent and identically distributed (iid) copies of a given bipartite state from the set of separable bipartite states. Here we prove that this result is robust, in the sense that the iid assumption can be relaxed to almost-iid. In particular, our result shows that the original argument of Brandão and Plenio, which contains a logical gap, can be made rigorous. Our proof relies on a novel continuity bound for the relative entropy of entanglement with respect to the quantum Wasserstein distance. Combined with a recent insight that almost-iid states and their exact iid counterparts are asymptotically close in this distance, the bound implies that their relative entropies of entanglement coincide asymptotically.