1,720,997 research outputs found

    Rapid mixing and stability of quantum dissipative systems

    No full text
    The physics of many materials is modeled by quantum many-body systems with local interactions. If the model of the system is sensitive to noise from the environment, or small perturbations to the original interactions, it will not properly model the robustness of the real physical system it aims to describe, or be useful when engineering novel systems for quantum information processing. We show that local observables and correlation functions of local Liouvillians are stable to local perturbations if the dynamics is rapidly mixing and has a unique fixed point. No other condition is required

    Undecidability of the Spectral Gap in One Dimension

    Full text link
    The spectral gap problem - determining whether the energy spectrum of a system has an energy gap above ground state, or if there is a continuous range of low-energy excitations - pervades quantum many-body physics. Recently, this important problem was shown to be undecidable for quantum-spin systems in two (or more) spatial dimensions: There exists no algorithm that determines in general whether a system is gapped or gapless, a result which has many unexpected consequences for the physics of such systems. However, there are many indications that one-dimensional spin systems are simpler than their higher-dimensional counterparts: For example, they cannot have thermal phase transitions or topological order, and there exist highly effective numerical algorithms such as the density matrix renormalization group - and even provably polynomial-time ones - for gapped 1D systems, exploiting the fact that such systems obey an entropy area law. Furthermore, the spectral gap undecidability construction crucially relied on aperiodic tilings, which are not possible in 1D. So does the spectral gap problem become decidable in 1D? In this paper, we prove this is not the case by constructing a family of 1D spin chains with translationally invariant nearest-neighbor interactions for which no algorithm can determine the presence of a spectral gap. This not only proves that the spectral gap of 1D systems is just as intractable as in higher dimensions, but it also predicts the existence of qualitatively new types of complex physics in 1D spin chains. In particular, it implies there are 1D systems with a constant spectral gap and nondegenerate classical ground state for all systems sizes up to an uncomputably large size, whereupon they switch to a gapless behavior with dense spectrum

    Stability of Local Quantum Dissipative Systems

    No full text
    Open quantum systems weakly coupled to the environment are modeled by completely positive, trace preserving semigroups of linear maps. The generators of such evolutions are called Lindbladians. In the setting of quantum many-body systems on a lattice it is natural to consider Lindbladians that decompose into a sum of local interactions with decreasing strength with respect to the size of their support. For both practical and theoretical reasons, it is crucial to estimate the impact that perturbations in the generating Lindbladian, arising as noise or errors, can have on the evolution. These local perturbations are potentially unbounded, but constrained to respect the underlying lattice structure. We show that even for polynomially decaying errors in the Lindbladian, local observables and correlation functions are stable if the unperturbed Lindbladian has a unique fixed point and a mixing time that scales logarithmically with the system size. The proof relies on Lieb–Robinson bounds, which describe a finite group velocity for propagation of information in local systems. As a main example, we prove that classical Glauber dynamics is stable under local perturbations, including perturbations in the transition rates, which may not preserve detailed balance

    Quantum conditional relative entropy and quasi-factorization of the relative entropy

    No full text
    The existence of a positive log-Sobolev constant implies a bound on the mixing time of a quantum dissipative evolution under the Markov approximation. For classical spin systems, such constant was proven to exist, under the assumption of a mixing condition in the Gibbs measure associated to their dynamics, via a quasi-factorization of the entropy in terms of the conditional entropy in some sub-σ-algebras. In this work we analyze analogous quasi-factorization results in the quantum case. For that, we define the quantum conditional relative entropy and prove several quasi-factorization results for it. As an illustration of their potential, we use one of them to obtain a positive log-Sobolev constant for the heat-bath dynamics with product fixed point.</p

    Superadditivity of Quantum Relative Entropy for General States

    No full text
    The property of superadditivity of the quantum relative entropy states that, in a bipartite system H AB = H A ⊗ H B , for every density operator ρ AB , one has D(ρ AB ||σ A ⊗ σ B )≥ D(ρ A ||σ A ) + D(ρB||σB). In this paper, we provide an extension of this inequality for arbitrary density operators σ AB . More specifically, we prove that α(σ AB )· D(ρ AB ||σ AB )≥D(ρ A ||σ A )+ D(ρ B ||σ B ) holds for all bipartite states ρ AB and σ AB , where α(σ AB ) = 1 + 2||σ A -1/2 ⊗ σ AB σ A -1/2 ⊗ σ B -1/2 - || AB || ∞ .Comunidad de MadridMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad (España)European CommissionFundación La CaixaIndependent Research Fund DenmarkDepto. de Análisis Matemático y Matemática AplicadaFac. de Ciencias MatemáticasTRUEpu

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

    Full text link
    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed

    Size-driven quantum phase transitions

    No full text
    Can the properties of the thermodynamic limit of a many-body quantum system be extrapolated by analyzing a sequence of finite-size cases? We present models for which such an approach gives completely misleading results: translationally invariant, local Hamiltonians on a square lattice with open boundary conditions and constant spectral gap, which have a classical product ground state for all system sizes smaller than a particular threshold size, but a ground state with topological degeneracy for all system sizes larger than this threshold. Starting from a minimal case with spins of dimension 6 and threshold lattice size 15 × 15, we show that the latter grows faster than any computable function with increasing local spin dimension. The resulting effect may be viewed as a unique type of quantum phase transition that is driven by the size of the system rather than by an external field or coupling strength. We prove that the construction is thermally robust, showing that these effects are in principle accessible to experimental observation

    Rapid Thermalization of Spin Chain Commuting Hamiltonians

    Full text link
    We prove that spin chains weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalize rapidly at any temperature for finite-range, translation-invariant commuting Hamiltonians, reaching equilibrium in a time which scales logarithmically with the system size. This generalizes to the quantum regime a seminal result of Holley and Stroock from 1989 for classical spin chains and represents an exponential improvement over previous bounds based on the nonclosure of the spectral gap. We discuss the implications in the context of dissipative phase transitions and in the study of symmetry protected topological phases

    Area law for fixed points of rapidly mixing dissipative quantum systems

    No full text
    We prove an area law with a logarithmic correction for the mutual information for fixed points of local dissipative quantum system satisfying a rapid mixing condition, under either of the following assumptions: the fixed point is pure or the system is frustration free
    corecore