A simple proof of the detectability lemma and spectral gap amplification

Abstract

The detectability lemma is a useful tool for probing the structure of gapped ground states of frustration-free Hamiltonians of lattice spin models. The lemma provides an estimate on the error incurred by approximating the ground space projector with a product of local projectors. We provide a simpler proof for the detectability lemma which applies to an arbitrary ordering of the local projectors, and show that it is tight up to a constant factor. As an application, we show how the lemma can be combined with a strong converse by Gao to obtain local spectral gap amplification: We show that by coarse graining a local frustration-free Hamiltonian with a spectral gap γ>0 to a length scale O(γ^(−1/2)), one gets a Hamiltonian with an Ω(1) spectral gap.