Undecidability of the Spectral Gap in One Dimension
Abstract
The spectral gap problem—determining whether the energy spectrum of a system has an energy gap above ground state, or if there is a continuous range of low-energy excitations—pervades quantum many-body physics. Recently, this important problem was shown to be undecidable for quantum-spin systems in two (or more) spatial dimensions: There exists no algorithm that determines in general whether a system is gapped or gapless, a result which has many unexpected consequences for the physics of such systems. However, there are many indications that one-dimensional spin systems are simpler than their higher-dimensional counterparts: For example, they cannot have thermal phase transitions or topological order, and there exist highly effective numerical algorithms such as the density matrix renormalization group—and even provably polynomial-time ones—for gapped 1D systems, exploiting the fact that such systems obey an entropy area law. Furthermore, the spectral gap undecidability construction crucially relied on aperiodic tilings, which are not possible in 1D. So does the spectral gap problem become decidable in 1D? In this paper, we prove this is not the case by constructing a family of 1D spin chains with translationally invariant nearest-neighbor interactions for which no algorithm can determine the presence of a spectral gap. This not only proves that the spectral gap of 1D systems is just as intractable as in higher dimensions, but it also predicts the existence of qualitatively new types of complex physics in 1D spin chains. In particular, it implies there are 1D systems with a constant spectral gap and nondegenerate classical ground state for all systems sizes up to an uncomputably large size, whereupon they switch to a gapless behavior with dense spectrum.
Additional Information
© 2020 The Author(s). Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI. (Received 22 October 2019; revised 24 April 2020; accepted 27 May 2020; published 17 August 2020) J. B. acknowledges support from the German National Academic Foundation, the EPSRC (Grant No. 1600123), and the Draper's Research Fellowship at Pembroke College. T. S. C. is supported by the Royal Society. A. L. acknowledges support from the European Research Council (Grant Agreement No. 337603) and VILLUM FONDEN via the QMATH Centre of Excellence (Grant No. 10059), the Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics in the form of the Sherman Fairchild Fellowship, as well as support from the Institute for Quantum Information and Matter, a NSF Physics Frontiers Center (NFS Grant No. PHY-1733907). D. P. G. acknowledges financial support from Spanish MINECO (Grants No. MTM2014-54240-P and No. MTM2017-88385-P and Severo Ochoa Project No. SEV-2015-556), Comunidad de Madrid (QUITEMAD + CM Grant No. S2013/ICE-2801), and the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement No. 648913).Attached Files
Published - PhysRevX.10.031038.pdf
Accepted Version - 1810.01858.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 105009
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20200818-151254755
- Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
- 1600123
- Pembroke College, University of Cambridge
- Royal Society
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 337603
- Villum Fonden
- 10059
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Caltech
- Sherman Fairchild Foundation
- Institute for Quantum Information and Matter (IQIM)
- NSF
- PHY-1733907
- Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
- MTM2014-54240-P
- Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO)
- MTM2017-88385-P
- Severo Ochoa
- SEV-2015-556
- Comunidad de Madrid
- S2013/ICE-2801
- European Research Council (ERC)
- 648913
- Created
-
2020-08-19Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
-
2021-11-16Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- Walter Burke Institute for Theoretical Physics, Institute for Quantum Information and Matter