Local stability of ground states in locally gapped and weakly interacting quantum spin systems

Abstract

Based on a result by Yarotsky (J. Stat. Phys. 118, 2005), we prove that localized but otherwise arbitrary perturbations of weakly interacting quantum spin systems with uniformly gapped on-site terms change the ground state of such a system only locally, even if they close the spectral gap. We call this a strong version of the local perturbations perturb locally (LPPL) principle which is known to hold for much more general gapped systems, but only for perturbations that do not close the spectral gap of the Hamiltonian. We also extend this strong LPPL-principle to Hamiltonians that have the appropriate structure of gapped on-site terms and weak interactions only locally in some region of space. While our results are technically corollaries to a theorem of Yarotsky, we expect that the paradigm of systems with a locally gapped ground state that is completely insensitive to the form of the Hamiltonian elsewhere extends to other situations and has important physical consequences.

9 pages, 2 figures; v1->v2: added references, v2->v3: updated references

References in corpus (2)

• Local Perturbations Perturb -Exponentially- Locally
• Stability of invertible, frustration-free ground states against large perturbations

Cited by in corpus (5)

• From decay of correlations to locality and stability of the Gibbs state
• Stability of invertible, frustration-free ground states against large perturbations
• Stability of the spectral gap and ground state indistinguishability for a decorated AKLT model
• Stability of thermal equilibrium in long-range quantum systems
• On adiabatic theory for extended fermionic lattice systems