Divide and conquer method for proving gaps of frustration free Hamiltonians


Abstract in English

Providing system-size independent lower bounds on the spectral gap of local Hamiltonian is in general a hard problem. For the case of finite-range, frustration free Hamiltonians on a spin lattice of arbitrary dimension, we show that a property of the ground state space is sufficient to obtain such a bound. We furthermore show that such a condition is necessary and equivalent to a constant spectral gap. Thanks to this equivalence, we can prove that for gapless models in any dimension, the spectral gap on regions of diameter $n$ is at most $oleft(frac{log(n)^{2+epsilon}}{n}right)$ for any positive $epsilon$.

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