It is well known in quantum mechanics that a large energy gap can suppress transitions due to additional couplings and lead to a constrained dynamics within a Hilbert subspace. However, a general and quantitative justification of this statement stays lacking. Here we establish an observable-based error bound for such constrained dynamics in generic gapped quantum systems. This universal bound is a linear function of time that only involves the energy gap and coupling strength, provided that the latter is much smaller than the former. We demonstrate that both the intercept and the slope in the bound can asymptotically be saturated by simple models. We generalize the result to quantum many-body systems with local interactions, for which the coupling strength diverges in the thermodynamic limit while the error is found to grow no faster than a power law $t^{d+1}$ in $d$ dimensions. Our work establishes a universal and rigorous result concerning nonequilibrium quantum dynamics.
Universal Error Bound for Constrained Quantum Dynamics