Since its introduction by Hastings (Phys Rev B 69:104431, 2004), the technique of quasi-adiabatic continuation has become a central tool in the discussion and classification of ground-state phases. It connects the ground states of self-adjoint Hamiltonians in the same phase by a unitary quasi-local transformation. This paper takes a step towards extending this result to non-self-adjoint perturbations, though, for technical reason, we restrict ourselves here to weak perturbations of non-interacting spins. The extension to non-self-adjoint perturbation is important for potential applications to Glauber dynamics (and its quantum analogues). In contrast to the standard quasi-adiabatic transformation, the transformation constructed here is exponentially local. Our scheme is inspired by KAM theory, with frustration-free operators playing the role of integrable Hamiltonians.
In @cite_20 @cite_32 the authors prove that the ground state gap for a class of frustration-free Hamiltonians is stable under arbitrary perturbations in the interaction. They use Hastings' spectral flow technique (or quasi-adiabatic continuation) to map the perturbed Hamiltonian by a similarity transformation to a Hamiltonian that is frustration-free (called locally block diagonal' in @cite_20 ) with respect to the unperturbed ground state and for which therefore a gap can be proved more easily. In our work we show that perturbations, which however need not to be self-adjoint, of classical Hamiltonians are similar to frustration-free ones. Moreover, if the perturbation is exponentially quasi-local, so is the new Hamiltonian. This is a new result that cannot be obtained through the sub-exponentially quasi-local spectral flow.
@cite_32 @cite_20
2135902788 2003341284 1983705091 2048738839
We prove stability of the spectral gap for gapped, frustration-free Hamiltonians under general, quasi-local perturbations. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for stability, which we call Local Topological Quantum Order and show that this condition implies an area law for the entanglement entropy of the groundstate subspace. This result extends previous work by on the stability of topological quantum order for Hamiltonians composed of commuting projections with a common zero-energy subspace. We conclude with a list of open problems relevant to spectral gaps and topological quantum order. Recently, the stability of certain topological phases of matter under weak perturbations was proven. Here, we present a short, alternate proof of the same result. We consider models of topological quantum order for which the unperturbed Hamiltonian H 0 can be written as a sum of local pairwise commuting projectors on a D-dimensional lattice. We consider a perturbed Hamiltonian H = H 0 + V involving a generic perturbation V that can be written as a sum of short-range bounded-norm interactions. We prove that if the strength of V is below a constant threshold value then H has well-defined spectral bands originating from the low-lying eigenvalues of H 0. These bands are separated from the rest of the spectrum and from each other by a constant gap. The width of the band originating from the smallest eigenvalue of H 0 decays faster than any power of the lattice size. This article investigates the stability of the ground state subspace of a canonical parent Hamiltonian of a Matrix product state against local perturbations. We prove that the spectral gap of such a Hamiltonian remains stable under weak local perturbations even in the thermodynamic limit, where the entire perturbation might not be bounded. Our discussion is based on preceding work by Yarotsky that develops a perturbation theory for relatively bounded quantum perturbations of classical Hamiltonians. We exploit a renormalization procedure, which on large scale transforms the parent Hamiltonian of a Matrix product state into a classical Hamiltonian plus some perturbation. We can thus extend Yarotsky’s results to provide a perturbation theory for parent Hamiltonians of Matrix product states and recover some of the findings of the independent contributions ( in Phys Rev B 8(11):115108, 2013) and (Michalakis and Pytel in Comm Math Phys 322(2):277–302, 2013). Consider a system governed by the time-dependent Schrodinger equation initialized in its ground state. When subjected to weak (size e) parametric forcing by an “ionizing field” (time-varying), the state decays with advancing time due to coupling of the bound state to radiation modes. The decay rate of this metastable state is governed by Fermi’s golden rule, Γ[V], which depends on the potential V and the details of the forcing. We pose the following potential design problem: find Vopt which minimizes Γ[V] (maximizes the lifetime of the state) over an admissible class of potentials with fixed spatial support. We formulate this problem as a constrained optimization problem and prove that an admissible optimal solution exists. Then, using quasi-Newton methods, we compute locally optimal potentials. These have the structure of a truncated periodic potential with a localized defect. In contrast to optimal structures for other spectral optimization problems, our optimizing potentials appear to be interior point...