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A gapped ground state of a quantum spin system has a natural length scale set by the gap. This length scale governs the decay of correlations. A common intuition is that this length scale also controls the spatial relaxation towards the ground state away from impurities or boundaries. The aim of this article is to take a step towards a proof of this intuition. We assume that the ground state is frustration-free and invertible, i.e. it has no long-range entanglement. Moreover, we assume the property that we are aiming to prove for one specific kind of boundary condition; namely open boundary conditions. This assumption is also known as the "local topological quantum order" (LTQO) condition. With these assumptions we can prove stretched exponential decay away from boundaries or impurities, for any of the ground states of the perturbed system. In contrast to most earlier results, we do not assume that the perturbations at the boundary or the impurity are small. In particular, the perturbed system itself can have long-range entanglement.
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Stability of the bulk gap for frustration-free topologically ordered quantum lattice systems
Abstract We prove that uniformly small short-range perturbations do not close the bulk gap above the ground state of frustration-free quantum spin systems that satisfy a standard local topological quantum order condition. In contrast with earlier results, we do not require a positive lower bound for finite-system spectral gaps uniform in the system size. To obtain this result, we extend the Bravyi–Hastings–Michalakis strategy so it can be applied to perturbations of the GNS Hamiltonian of the infinite-system ground state.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2108390
- PAR ID:
- 10489263
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Science + Business Media
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Letters in Mathematical Physics
- Volume:
- 114
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1573-0530
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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