Local gap threshold for frustration-free spin systems

Abstract

We improve Knabe’s spectral gap bound for frustration-free translation-invariant local Hamiltonians in 1D. The bound is based on a relationship between global and local gaps. The global gap is the spectral gap of a size-m chain with periodic boundary conditions, while the local gap is that of a subchain of size n < m with open boundary conditions. Knabe proved that if the local gap is larger than the threshold value 1/(n − 1) for some n > 2, then the global gap is lower bounded by a positive constant in the thermodynamic limit m → ∞. Here we improve the threshold to 6n(n+1), which is better (smaller) for all n > 3 and which is asymptotically optimal. As a corollary we establish a surprising fact about 1D translation-invariant frustration-free systems that are gapless in the thermodynamic limit: for any such system the spectral gap of a size-n chain with open boundary conditions is upper bounded as O(n−2). This contrasts with gapless frustrated systems where the gap can be Θ(n−1). It also limits the extent to which the area law is violated in these frustration-free systems, since it implies that the half-chain entanglement entropy is O(1/ϵ) as a function of spectral gap ϵ. We extend our results to frustration-free systems on a 2D square lattice.