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Stability of Frustration-Free Hamiltonians

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Abstract

We prove stability of the spectral gap for gapped, frustration-free Hamiltonians under general, quasi-local perturbations. We present a necessary and sufficient condition for stability, which we call Local Topological Quantum Order and show that this condition implies an area law for the entanglement entropy of the groundstate subspace. This result extends previous work by Bravyi et al. on the stability of topological quantum order for Hamiltonians composed of commuting projections with a common zero-energy subspace. We conclude with a list of open problems relevant to spectral gaps and topological quantum order.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, 91125, USA

    Spyridon Michalakis

  2. Department of Physics, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Torun, Poland

    Justyna P. Zwolak

  3. Department of Physics, Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR, 97331, USA

    Justyna P. Zwolak

Authors
  1. Spyridon Michalakis
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  2. Justyna P. Zwolak
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Correspondence to Spyridon Michalakis.

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Communicated by M. B. Ruskai

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Michalakis, S., Zwolak, J.P. Stability of Frustration-Free Hamiltonians. Commun. Math. Phys. 322, 277–302 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-013-1762-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-013-1762-6

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