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.
Frustration-freeness was as a helpful property in many studies of gapped systems, see e.g. @cite_22 @cite_17 on lower bounds of ground state gaps. It is thus good news that frustration-free systems appear to be rather generic. In @cite_27 , Hastings showed that every gapped local Hamiltonian can be rewritten as approximately frustration-free Hamiltonian upon increasing the range of the interaction (the error vanishes in the limit of infinite range). As another example, matrix product states in one-dimensional spin chains always possess a frustration-free parent Hamiltonian @cite_11 . A close connection between such parent Hamiltonians and perturbations of classical systems was worked out in @cite_2 .
@cite_22 @cite_17 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_11
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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. 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). 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. We show that any short-range Hamiltonian with a gap between the ground and excited states can be written as a sum of local operators, such that the ground state is an approximate eigenvector of each operator separately. We then show that the ground state of any such Hamiltonian is close to a generalized matrix product state. The range of the given operators needed to obtain a good approximation to the ground state is proportional to the square of the logarithm of the system size times a characteristic factorization length.'' Applications to many-body quantum simulation are discussed. We also consider density matrices of systems at non zero temperature.