Stability of invertible, frustration-free ground states against large perturbations

TL;DR

This paper proves that invertible, frustration-free quantum ground states exhibit stretched exponential decay away from boundaries or impurities under large perturbations, even without assuming small boundary or impurity perturbations.

Contribution

It establishes decay properties of ground states under large perturbations without requiring small boundary or impurity effects, advancing understanding of quantum state stability.

Findings

Decay is stretched exponential away from boundaries or impurities.

Results hold for large, not necessarily small, perturbations.

Applicable to systems with long-range entanglement.

Abstract

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.