Matrix Product Representation of Locality Preserving Unitaries

Abstract

Matrix product representation provides a useful formalism to study not only entangled states but also entangled operators in one dimension. In this paper, we focus on unitary transformations and show that matrix product operators that are unitary provide a necessary and sufficient representation of one-dimensional (1D) unitaries that preserve locality. That is, we show that matrix product operators that are unitary are guaranteed to preserve locality by mapping local operators to local operators, while at the same time all locality-preserving unitaries can be represented in a matrix product way. Moreover, we show that matrix product representation gives a straightforward way to extract the index defined by Gross, Nesme, Vogts, and Werner in [D. Gross et al., Commun. Math. Phys. 310, 419 (2012)] for classifying 1D locality-preserving unitaries. The key to our discussion is a set of “fixed-point” conditions which characterize the form of the matrix product unitary operators after blocking sites. Finally, we show that if the unitary condition is only required for certain system sizes, then matrix product formalism allows more possibilities. In particular, we give an example of a simple matrix product operator which is unitary only for odd system sizes, does not preserve locality, and carries a “fractional” index.