arXiv subjects
Publications and source records attributed to Martin Fraas.
We investigate a proposal of Kitaev for a microscopic construction of a Hamiltonian intended to describe the edge dynamics of a quantum Hall system. We show that the construction works in the setting of translation-invariant free-fermion Hamiltonians. In this case, the resulting edge Hamiltonian exhibits only edge modes, and these modes have the correct chirality.
We consider spin chains with a finite range Hamiltonian. For reasons of simplicity, the chain is taken to be infinitely long. A ground state is said to be a unique gapped ground state if its GNS Hamiltonian has a unique ground state, separated by a gap from the rest of the spectrum. By combining some powerful techniques developed in the last years, we prove that each unique gapped ground state is short-range entangled: It can be mapped into a product state by a finite time evolution map generated by a Hamiltonian with exponentially quasi-local interaction terms. This claim makes precise the common belief that one-dimensional gapped systems are topologically trivial in the bulk.
We consider the locality and spectral properties of the smearing \[ \tau_f(A) = \int_{-\infty}^\infty dt \, f(t) \, \tau_t(A) \] when applied to the dynamics $\tau_t$ of quantum spin systems. While recent applications of this map have used superpolynomially but not exponentially decaying functions $f$ to ensure exact spectral properties, we use here Gaussian filters. This improves the locality at the expense of errors on the spectral side. We propose a number of concrete applications, from quasi-adiabatic continuation to correlation decay, and exponential stability away from impurities. Finally, we discuss an application to the quantum Hall effect.
In this study, we examine the quantization of Hall conductance in an infinite plane geometry. We consider a microscopic charge-conserving system with a pure, gapped infinite-volume ground state. While Hall conductance is well-defined in this scenario, existing proofs of its quantization have relied on assumptions of either weak interactions, or properties of finite volume ground state spaces, or invertibility. Here, we assume that the conditions necessary to construct the braided $C^*$-tensor category which describes anyonic excitations are satisfied, and we demonstrate that the Hall conductance is rational if the tensor category is finite.
Single-mode squeezed states exhibit a direct correspondence with points on the Poincar\'e disk. In this study, we delve into this correspondence and describe the motions of the disk generated by a quadratic Hamiltonian. This provides a geometric representation of squeezed states and their evolution. We discuss applications in bang-bang and adiabatic control problems involving squeezed states.
Let $\{V_1, \dots, V_n \}$ be a set of mutually commuting matrices. We show that if $V_1^* V_1 + \cdots +V_n^* V_n = {\rm Id}$ then the matrices are normal and, in particular, simultaneously diagonalizable.
Recently, a theory has been proposed that classifies cyclic processes of symmetry protected topological (SPT) quantum states. For the case of spin chains, i.e.\ one-dimensional bosonic SPT's, this theory implies that cyclic processes are classified by zero-dimensional SPT's. This is often described as a generalization of Thouless pumps, with the original Thouless pump corresponding to the case where the symmetry group is $U(1)$ and pumps are classified by an integer that corresponds to the charge pumped per cycle. In this paper, we review this one-dimensional theory in an explicit and rigorous setting and we provide a proof for the completeness of the proposed classification for compact symmetry groups $G$.
This work justifies the linear response formula for the Hall conductance of a two-dimensional disordered system. The proof rests on controlling the dynamics associated with a random time-dependent Hamiltonian. The principal challenge is related to the fact that spectral and dynamical localization are intrinsically unstable under perturbation, and the exact spectral flow - the tool used previously to control the dynamics in this context - does not exist. We resolve this problem by proving a local adiabatic theorem: With high probability, the physical evolution of a localized eigenstate $\psi$ associated with a random system remains close to the spectral flow for a restriction of the instantaneous Hamiltonian to a region $R$ where the bulk of $\psi$ is supported. Allowing $R$ to grow at most logarithmically in time ensures that the deviation of the physical evolution from this spectral flow is small. To substantiate our claim on the failure of the global spectral flow in disordered systems, we prove eigenvector hybridization in a one-dimensional Anderson model at all scales.
The appearance of tracks, close to classical orbits, left by charged quantum particles propagating inside a detector, such as a cavity periodically illuminated by light pulses, is studied for a family of idealized models. In the semi-classical regime, which is reached when one considers highly energetic particles, we present a detailed, mathematically rigorous analysis of this phenomenon. If the Hamiltonian of the particles is quadratic in position- and momentum operators, as in the examples of a freely moving particle or a particle in a homogeneous external magnetic field, we show how symmetries, such as spherical symmetry, of the initial state of a particle are broken by tracks consisting of infinitely many approximately measured particle positions and how, in the classical limit, the initial position and velocity of a classical particle trajectory can be reconstructed from the observed particle track.
A gapped ground state of a quantum spin system has a natural length scale set by the gap. This length scale governs the decay of correlations. A common intuition is that this length scale also controls the spatial relaxation towards the ground state away from impurities or boundaries. The aim of this article is to take a step towards a proof of this intuition. We assume that the ground state is frustration-free and invertible, i.e.\ it has no long-range entanglement. Moreover, we assume the property that we are aiming to prove for one specific kind of boundary condition; namely open boundary conditions. This assumption is also known as the "local topological quantum order" (LTQO) condition. With these assumptions we can prove stretched exponential decay away from boundaries or impurities, for any of the ground states of the perturbed system. In contrast to most earlier results, we do not assume that the perturbations at the boundary or the impurity are small. In particular, the perturbed system itself can have long-range entanglement.
We establish a sufficient condition under which ${\rm det}\,(ABA^{-1}B^{-1})=1$ for a pair of bounded, invertible operators $A,B$ on a Hilbert space.
The phenomenon that a quantum particle propagating in a detector, such as a Wilson cloud chamber, leaves a track close to a classical trajectory is analyzed. We introduce an idealized quantum-mechanical model of a charged particle that is periodically illuminated by pulses of laser light resulting in repeated indirect measurements of the approximate position of the particle. For this model we present a mathematically rigorous analysis of the appearance of particle tracks, assuming that the Hamiltonian of the particle is quadratic in the position- and momentum operators, as for a freely moving particle or a harmonic oscillator.
In general, linear response theory expresses the relation between a driving and a physical system's response only to first order in perturbation theory. In the context of charge transport, this is the linear relation between current and electromotive force expressed in Ohm's law. We show here that, in the case of the quantum Hall effect, all higher order corrections vanish. We prove this in a fully interacting setting and without flux averaging.
We review proofs of a theorem of Bloch on the absence of macroscopic stationary currents in quantum systems. The standard proof shows that the current in 1D vanishes in the large volume limit under rather general conditions. In higher dimension, the total current across a cross-section does not need to vanish in gapless systems but it does vanish in gapped systems. We focus on the latter claim and give a self-contained proof motivated by a recently introduced index for many-body charge transport in quantum lattice systems having a conserved $U(1)$-charge.
Quantum trajectories are Markov processes that describe the time-evolution of a quantum system undergoing continuous indirect measurement. Mathematically, they are defined as solutions of the so-called "Stochastic Schrödinger Equations", which are nonlinear stochastic differential equations driven by Poisson and Wiener processes. This paper is devoted to the study of the invariant measures of quantum trajectories. Particularly, we prove that the invariant measure is unique under an ergodicity condition on the mean time evolution, and a "purification" condition on the generator of the evolution. We further show that quantum trajectories converge in law exponentially fast towards this invariant measure. We illustrate our results with examples where we can derive explicit expressions for the invariant measure.
We consider charge transport for interacting many-body systems with a gapped ground state subspace which is finitely degenerate and topologically ordered. To any locality-preserving, charge-conserving unitary that preserves the ground state space, we associate an index that is an integer multiple of $1/p$, where $p$ is the ground state degeneracy. We prove that the index is additive under composition of unitaries. This formalism gives rise to several applications: fractional quantum Hall conductance, a fractional Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem that generalizes the standard LSM to systems where the translation-invariance is broken, and the interacting generalization of the Avron-Dana-Zak relation between Hall conductance and the filling factor.
We propose a many-body index that extends Fredholm index theory to many-body systems. The index is defined for any charge-conserving system with a topologically ordered $p$-dimensional ground state sector. The index is fractional with the denominator given by $p$. In particular, this yields a new short proof of the quantization of the Hall conductance and of Lieb-Schulz-Mattis theorem. In the case that the index is non-integer, the argument provides an explicit construction of Wilson loop operators exhibiting a non-trivial braiding and that can be used to create fractionally charged Abelian anyons.
We propose an index for pairs of a unitary map and a clustering state on many-body quantum systems. We require the map to conserve an integer-valued charge and to leave the state, e.g. a gapped ground state, invariant. This index is integer-valued and stable under perturbations. In general, the index measures the charge transport across a fiducial line. We show that it reduces to (i) an index of projections in the case of non-interacting fermions, (ii) the charge density for translational invariant systems, and (iii) the quantum Hall conductance in the two-dimensional setting without any additional symmetry. Example (ii) recovers the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem, and (iii) provides a new and short proof of quantization of Hall conductance in interacting many-body systems.