New Journal of Physics (Jan 2016)

Concentration bounds for quantum states with finite correlation length on quantum spin lattice systems

  • Anurag Anshu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/18/8/083011
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 18, no. 8
p. 083011

Abstract

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We consider the problem of determining the energy distribution of quantum states that satisfy exponential decay of correlation and product states, with respect to a quantum local Hamiltonian on a spin lattice. For a quantum state on a D -dimensional lattice that has correlation length σ and has average energy e with respect to a given local Hamiltonian (with n local terms, each of which has norm at most 1), we show that the overlap of this state with eigenspace of energy f is at most $\exp {(-({(e-f)}^{2}\sigma )}^{\tfrac{1}{D+1}}/{n}^{\tfrac{1}{D+1}}D\sigma )$ . This bound holds whenever $| e-f| \gt {2}^{D}\sqrt{n\sigma }$ . Thus, on a one-dimensional lattice, the tail of the energy distribution decays exponentially with the energy. For product states, we improve above result to obtain a Gaussian decay in energy, even for quantum spin systems without an underlying lattice structure. Given a product state on a collection of spins which has average energy e with respect to a local Hamiltonian (with n local terms and each local term overlapping with at most m other local terms), we show that the overlap of this state with eigenspace of energy f is at most $\exp (-{(e-f)}^{2}/{{nm}}^{2})$ . This bound holds whenever $| e-f| \gt m\sqrt{n}$ .

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