Bootstrap certification of string order in quantum spin chains

Abstract

The many-body bootstrap certifies ground-state properties by minimizing energy over correlators constrained only by positivity, without any variational wavefunction. Its cost, however, grows exponentially with the size of the operators involved, placing the long-range string correlators that diagnose topological phases out of reach. We overcome this by treating string operators as primary objects: bare and endpoint-dressed strings satisfy a closed operator algebra with one another and with local words, yielding a semidefinite program whose cost grows only polynomially with string length. A single computation then yields estimates of string correlators of all lengths. Rigorous two-sided bounds are obtained for each target string once the ground-state energy is pinned within a window. When benchmarked against density-matrix renormalization group computations on the cluster Ising and spin$-1$ Heisenberg chains, the method certifies the nonlocal string order of the cluster and Haldane phases directly from the Hamiltonian. Our rigorous certification of string order parameters reveal that the sharpness of the bounds is set by which operators enter the calculation, not by their length alone. By exploiting algebraic closure of strings and local words, our framework lifts spatially extended observables into polynomially tractable bootstrap variables, opening up a route to wavefunction-free certification of nonlocal order in quantum many-body systems.