Divide and conquer method for proving gaps of frustration free Hamiltonians

TY - JOUR

T1 - Divide and conquer method for proving gaps of frustration free Hamiltonians

AU - Kastoryano, Michael J.

AU - Lucia, Angelo

N1 - 26 pages, 3 figures

PY - 2018/3/27

Y1 - 2018/3/27

N2 - Providing system-size independent lower bounds on the spectral gap of local Hamiltonian is in general a hard problem. For the case of finite-range, frustration free Hamiltonians on a spin lattice of arbitrary dimension, we show that a property of the ground state space is sufficient to obtain such a bound. We furthermore show that such a condition is necessary and equivalent to a constant spectral gap. Thanks to this equivalence, we can prove that for gapless models in any dimension, the spectral gap on regions of diameter n is at most for any positive.

AB - Providing system-size independent lower bounds on the spectral gap of local Hamiltonian is in general a hard problem. For the case of finite-range, frustration free Hamiltonians on a spin lattice of arbitrary dimension, we show that a property of the ground state space is sufficient to obtain such a bound. We furthermore show that such a condition is necessary and equivalent to a constant spectral gap. Thanks to this equivalence, we can prove that for gapless models in any dimension, the spectral gap on regions of diameter n is at most for any positive.

KW - math-ph

KW - math.MP

KW - quant-ph

U2 - 10.1088/1742-5468/aaa793

DO - 10.1088/1742-5468/aaa793

M3 - Journal article

SN - 1742-5468

VL - 2018

SP - 1

EP - 23

JO - Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment

JF - Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment

M1 - 033105

ER -