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.
We prove that for any finite set of generalized valence bond solid (GVBS) states of a quantum spin chain there exists a translation invariant finite-range Hamiltonian for which this set is the set of ground states. This result implies that there are GVBS models with arbitrary broken discrete symmetries that are described as combinations of lattice translations, lattice reflections, and local unitary or anti-unitary transformations. We also show that all GVBS models that satisfy some natural conditions have a spectral gap. The existence of a spectral gap is obtained by applying a simple and quite general strategy for proving lower bounds on the spectral gap of the generator of a classical or quantum spin dynamics. This general scheme is interesting in its own right and threfore, although the basic idea is not new, we present it in a system-independent setting. The results are illustrated with a number of examples.  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. 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). We study a construction that yields a class of translation invariant states on quantum spin chains, characterized by the property that the correlations across any bond can be modeled on a finite-dimensional vector space. These states can be considered as generalized valence bond states, and they are dense in the set of all translation invariant states. We develop a complete theory of the ergodic decomposition of such states, including the decomposition into periodic “Neel ordered” states. The ergodic components have exponential decay of correlations. All states considered can be obtained as “local functions” of states of a special kind, so-called “purely generated states,” which are shown to be ground states for suitably chosen finite range VBS interactions. We show that all these generalized VBS models have a spectral gap. Our theory does not require symmetry of the state with respect to a local gauge group. In particular we illustrate our results with a one-parameter family of examples which are not isotropic except for one special case. This isotropic model coincides with the one-dimensional antiferromagnet, recently studied by Affleck, Kennedy, Lieb, and Tasaki.