The Lieb-Robinson (LR) bound rigorously shows that in quantum systems with short-range interactions, the maximum amount of information that travels beyond an effective "light cone" decays exponentially with distance from the light-cone front, which expands at finite velocity. Despite being a fundamental result, existing bounds are often extremely loose, limiting their applications. We introduce a method that dramatically and qualitatively improves LR bounds in models with finite-range interactions. Most prominently, in systems with a large local Hilbert space dimension $D$, our method gives an LR velocity that grows much slower than previous bounds with $D$ as $D\to \infty$. For example, in the Heisenberg model with spin $S$, we find $v\leq$ const. compared to the previous $v\propto S$ which diverges at large $S$, and in multiorbital Hubbard models with $N$ orbitals, we find $v\propto \sqrt{N}$ instead of previous $v\propto N$, and similarly in the $N$-state truncated Bose-Hubbard model and Wen's quantum rotor model. Our bounds also scale qualitatively better in some systems when the spatial dimension or certain model parameters become large, for example in the $d$-dimensional quantum Ising model and perturbed toric code models. Even in spin-1/2 Ising and Fermi-Hubbard models, our method improves the LR velocity by an order of magnitude with typical model parameters, and significantly improves the LR bound at large distance and early time.
We prove Lieb-Robinson bounds for the dynamics of systems with an infinite dimensional Hilbert space and generated by unbounded Hamiltonians. In particular, we consider quantum harmonic and certain anharmonic lattice systems.
I review the role of Lieb-Robinson bounds in characterizing and utilizing the locality properties of the Heisenberg dynamics of quantum lattice systems. In particular, I discuss two definitions of gapped ground state phases and show that they are essentially equivalent.
This paper has been withdrawn by the authors because of an error in the proof. We can, however, prove a weaker spatial fall-off that is still superlinear, namely exp[-x log x].
We introduce a class of UV-regularized two-body interactions for fermions in $\mathbb{R}^d$ and prove a Lieb-Robinson estimate for the dynamics of this class of many-body systems. As a step toward this result, we also prove a propagation bound of Lieb-Robinson type for Schrödinger operators. We apply the propagation bound to prove the existence of infinite-volume dynamics as a strongly continuous group of automorphisms on the CAR algebra.
We consider the isotropic XY quantum spin chain in a random external field in the $z$ direction, with single site distributions given by i.i.d. random variables times the critical decaying envelope $j^{-1/2}$. Our motivation is the study of many-body localization. We investigate transport properties in terms of polynomial Lieb-Robinson (PLR) bounds. We prove a zero-velocity PLR bound for large disorder strength $λ$ and for small $λ$ we show a partial converse, which suggests the existence of non-trivial transport in the model.
We derive a Lieb-Robinson bound for the propagation of spin correlations in a model of spins interacting through a bosonic lattice field, which satisfies itself a Lieb-Robinson bound in the absence of spin-boson couplings. We apply these bounds to a system of trapped ions, and find that the propagation of spin correlations, as mediated by the phonons of the ion crystal, can be faster than the regimes currently explored in experiments. We propose a scheme to test the bounds by measuring retarded correlation functions via the crystal fluorescence.
We prove Lieb-Robinson bounds and the existence of the thermodynamic limit for a general class of irreversible dynamics for quantum lattice systems with time-dependent generators that satisfy a suitable decay condition in space.
We consider the possibility of developing a Lieb-Robinson bound for the double bracket flow. This is a differential equation $$\partial_B H(B)=[[V,H(B)],H(B)]$$ which may be used to diagonalize Hamiltonians. Here, $V$ is fixed and $H(0)=H$. We argue (but do not prove) that $H(B)$ need not converge to a limit for nonzero real $B$ in the infinite volume limit, even assuming several conditions on $H(0)$. However, we prove Lieb-Robinson bounds for all $B$ for the double-bracket flow for free fermion systems, but the range increases \emph{exponentially} with the control parameter $B$.
This is an introductory text reviewing Lieb-Robinson bounds for open and closed quantum many-body systems. We introduce the Heisenberg picture for time-dependent local Liouvillians and state a Lieb-Robinson bound that gives rise to a maximum speed of propagation of correlations in many body systems of locally interacting spins and fermions. Finally, we discuss a number of important consequences concerning the simulation of time evolution and properties of ground states and stationary states.
Discrete lattice models are a cornerstone of quantum many-body physics. They arise as effective descriptions of condensed matter systems and lattice-regularized quantum field theories. Lieb-Robinson bounds imply that if the degrees of freedom at each lattice site only interact locally with each other, correlations can only propagate with a finite group velocity through the lattice, similarly to a light cone in relativistic systems. Here we show that Lieb-Robinson bounds are equivalent to the locality of the interactions: a system with k-body interactions fulfills Lieb-Robinson bounds in expone…
We give an overview of recent results on Lieb-Robinson bounds and some of their applications in the study of quantum many-body models in condensed matter physics.
We consider the dynamics of the Bose-Hubbard model on general lattices and prove a Lieb-Robinson bound for observables whose supports are separated by an initially almost particle-free region. We further obtain a maximal velocity bound for particle transport through an initially empty region which also applies to long-range hopping. Our techniques originate in the proofs of maximal velocity bounds for Schrödinger operators and scattering theory in non-relativistic QED.
In this work, we investigate how quickly local perturbations propagate in interacting boson systems with Bose-Hubbard-type Hamiltonians. In general, these systems have unbounded local energies, and arbitrarily fast information propagation may occur. We focus on a specific but experimentally natural situation in which the number of bosons at any one site in the unperturbed initial state is approximately limited. We rigorously prove the existence of an almost-linear information-propagation light-cone, thus establishing a Lieb--Robinson bound: the wave-front grows at most as $t\log^2 (t)$. We pro…
For a mixture of interacting Bose gases initially prepared in a regime of condensation (uncorrelation), it is proved that in the course of the the time evolution observables of disjoint sets of particles of each species have correlation functions that remain asymptotically small in the total number of particles and display a controlled growth in time. This is obtained by means of ad hoc estimates of Lieb-Robinson type on the propagation of the interaction, established here for the multi-component Bose mixture.
We consider translation invariant gapped quantum spin systems satisfying the Lieb-Robinson bound and containing single-particle states in a ground state representation. Following the Haag-Ruelle approach from relativistic quantum field theory, we construct states describing collisions of several particles, and define the corresponding $S$-matrix. We also obtain some general restrictions on the shape of the energy-momentum spectrum. For the purpose of our analysis we adapt the concepts of almost local observables and energy-momentum transfer (or Arveson spectrum) from relativistic QFT to the la…
The Lieb-Robinson bound shows the existence of a maximum speed of signal propagation in discrete quantum mechanical systems with local interactions. This generalizes the concept of relativistic causality beyond field theory, and provides a powerful tool in theoretical condensed matter physics and quantum information science. Here, we extend the scope of this seminal result by considering general Markovian quantum evolution, where we prove that an equivalent bound holds. In addition, we use the generalized bound to demonstrate that correlations in the stationary state of a Markov process decay …
The Lieb-Robinson theorem states that the speed at which the correlations between two distant nodes in a spin network can be built through local interactions has an upper bound, which is called the Lieb-Robinson velocity. Our central aim is to demonstrate how to observe the Lieb-Robinson velocity in an Ising spin chain with a strong transverse field. We adopt and compare four correlation measures for characterizing different types of correlations, which include correlation function, mutual information, quantum discord, and entanglement of formation. We prove that one of correlation functions s…
The Lieb-Robinson theorem states that information propagates with a finite velocity in quantum systems on a lattice with nearest-neighbor interactions. What are the speed limits on information propagation in quantum systems with power-law interactions, which decay as $1/r^α$ at distance $r$? Here, we present a definitive answer to this question for all exponents $α>2d$ and all spatial dimensions $d$. Schematically, information takes time at least $r^{\min\{1, α-2d\}}$ to propagate a distance~$r$. As recent state transfer protocols saturate this bound, our work closes a decades-long hunt for op…
Unitary dynamics with a strict causal cone (or "light cone") have been studied extensively, under the name of quantum cellular automata (QCAs). In particular, QCAs in one dimension have been completely classified by an index theory. Physical systems often exhibit only approximate causal cones; Hamiltonian evolutions on the lattice satisfy Lieb-Robinson bounds rather than strict locality. This motivates us to study approximately locality preserving unitaries (ALPUs). We show that the index theory is robust and completely extends to one-dimensional ALPUs. As a consequence, we achieve a converse …
We study the velocity of the propagation of information for a class of local dissipative quantum dynamics. This finite velocity is expressed by the so-called Lieb-Robinson bound. Besides the properties of the already studied dynamics, we consider an additional relation that expresses the propagation of certain subspaces. The previously derived bounds did not reflect the dissipative character of the dynamics and yielded the same result as for the reversible case. In this article, we show that for this class the velocity of propagation of information is time dependent and decays in time towards …
We propose new Lieb-Robinson bounds (bounds on the speed of propagation of information in quantum systems) with an explicit dependence on the interaction strengths of the Hamiltonian. For systems with more than two interactions it is found that the Lieb-Robinson speed is not always algebraic in the interaction strengths. We consider Hamiltonians with any finite number of bounded operators and also a certain class of unbounded operators. We obtain bounds and propagation speeds for quantum systems on lattices and also general graphs possessing a kind of homogeneity and isotropy. One area for whi…
The Lieb-Robinson correlation function captures propagation of quantum correlations in a many-body system. We calculate the value of the leading order of the correlation function, not its bound, for a system of interacting qubits at early times. The general analytical result is compared to numerical calculations and is applied to regular qubit lattices in one, two, and three dimensions. The Lieb-Robinson velocity and the approximately exponential leading edge of correlations emerge in the limit of large arrays.
We extend the concept of locality to enclose a situation where a tensor-product structure for the Hilbert space is not \textit {a priori} assumed; rather, this locality is related to a given matrix representation of the Hamiltonian associated to the system. As a result, we formulate a Lieb-Robinson-like bound for Hamiltonians local in a given basis. In particular, we employ this bound to obtain alternatively the adiabatic condition, where adiabaticity is naturally ensued from a locality in energy basis and a relatively small Lieb-Robinson bound.
Spin-polarized scanning tunneling microscopy is identified as a suitable experimental technique to investigate the quantitative quality of Lieb-Robinson bounds on the signal velocity. The latest, most general bound is simplified and it is shown that there is a discrepancy by a factor of approximately 4 between the corresponding limit speed and some estimated exact velocities in atomic spin chains. The observed discrepancy facilitates conclusions for a further mathematical improvement of Lieb-Robinson bounds. The real signal propagation can be modified with several experimental parameters from …
A quantum quench is the simplest protocol to investigate nonequilibrium many-body quantum dynamics. Previous studies on the entanglement properties of quenched quantum many-body systems mainly focus on the growth of entanglement entropy. Several rigorous results and phenomenological guiding principles have been established, such as the no-faster-than-linear entanglement growth generated by generic local Hamiltonians and the peculiar logarithmic growth for many-body localized systems. However, little is known about the dynamical behavior of the full entanglement spectrum, which is a refined cha…
We rigorously prove a new kind of anomalous (or sub-ballistic) Lieb-Robinson bound for the isotropic XY chain with Fibonacci external magnetic field at arbitrary coupling. It is anomalous in that the usual exponential decay in $x-vt$ is replaced by exponential decay in $x-vt^α$ with $0<α<1$. In fact, we can characterize the values of $α$ for which such a bound holds as those exceeding $α_u^+$, the upper transport exponent of the one-body Fibonacci Hamiltonian. Following the approach of \cite{HSS11}, we relate Lieb-Robinson bounds to dynamical bounds for the one-body Hamiltonian corresponding t…
We state and prove four types of Lieb-Robinson bounds valid for many-body open quantum systems with power law decaying interactions undergoing out of equilibrium dynamics. We also provide an introductory and self-contained discussion of the setting and tools necessary to prove these results. The results found here apply to physical systems in which both long-ranged interactions and dissipation are present, as commonly encountered in certain quantum simulators, such as Rydberg systems or Coulomb crystals formed by ions.
Instances of discrete quantum systems coupled to a continuum of oscillators are ubiquitous in physics. Often the continua are approximated by a discrete set of modes. We derive analytical error bounds on expectation values of system observables that have been time evolved under such discretised Hamiltonians. These bounds take on the form of a function of time and the number of discrete modes, where the discrete modes are chosen according to Gauss quadrature rules. The derivation makes use of tools from the field of Lieb-Robinson bounds and the theory of orthonormal polynominals.
Lieb and Robinson provided bounds on how fast bipartite connected correlations can arise in systems with only short-range interactions. We generalize Lieb-Robinson bounds on bipartite connected correlators to multipartite connected correlators. The bounds imply that an $n$-partite connected correlator can reach unit value in constant time. Remarkably, the bounds also allow for an $n$-partite connected correlator to reach a value that is exponentially large with system size in constant time, a feature which stands in contrast to bipartite connected correlations. We provide explicit examples of …
The commutator between operators at different space and time has been a diagnostic for locality of unitary evolution. Most existing results are either for specific tractable (random) Hamiltonians(Out-of-Time-Order-Correlators calculations), or for worse case Hamiltonians (Lieb-Robinson-like bounds or OTOC bounds). In this work, we study commutators in typical Hamiltonians. Draw a sample from any zero-mean bounded independent random Hamiltonian ensemble, time-independent or Brownian, we formulate concentration bounds in the spectral norm and for the OTOC with arbitrary non-random state. Our bou…
We announce and sketch the rigorous proof of a new kind of anomalous (or sub-ballistic) Lieb-Robinson bound for an isotropic XY chain in a quasi-periodic transversal magnetic field. By "anomalous", we mean that the usual effective light cone defined by $|x|\leq v|t|$ is replaced by the region $|x|\leq v|t|^α$ for some $0<α<1$. In fact, we can characterize exactly the values of $α$ for which this holds as those exceeding the upper transport exponent $α_u^+$ of an appropriate one-body discrete Schrödinger operator. Previous study has produced a good amount of quantitative information on $α_u^+$.…
As experiments are increasingly able to probe the quantum dynamics of systems with many degrees of freedom, it is interesting to probe fundamental bounds on the dynamics of quantum information. We elaborate on the relationship between one such bound---the Lieb-Robinson bound---and the butterfly effect in strongly-coupled quantum systems. The butterfly effect implies the ballistic growth of local operators in time, which can be quantified with the "butterfly" velocity $v_B$. Similarly, the Lieb-Robinson velocity places a state independent ballistic upper bound on the size of time evolved operat…
We study equilibration of an isolated quantum system by mapping it onto a network of classical oscillators in Hilbert space. By choosing a suitable basis for this mapping, the degree of locality of the quantum system reflects in the sparseness of the network. We derive a Lieb-Robinson bound on the speed of propagation across the classical network, which allows us to estimate the timescale at which the quantum system equilibrates. The bound contains a parameter that quantifies the degree of locality of the Hamiltonian and the observable. Locality was disregarded in earlier studies of equilibrat…
We apply the Lieb-Robinson bounds technique to find the maximum speed of interaction in a spin model with topological order whose low-energy effective theory describes light [see X.-G. Wen, \prb {\bf 68}, 115413 (2003)]. The maximum speed of interactions is found in two dimensions is bounded from above less than $\sqrt{2} e$ times the speed of emerging light, giving a strong indication that light is indeed the maximum speed of interactions. This result does not rely on mean field theoretic methods. In higher spatial dimensions, the Lieb-Robinson speed is conjectured to increase linearly with t…
We consider free fermions living on lattices in arbitrary dimensions, where hopping amplitudes follow a power-law decay with respect to the distance. We focus on the regime where this power is larger than the spatial dimension (i.e., where the single particle energies are guaranteed to be bounded) for which we provide a comprehensive series of fundamental constraints on their equilibrium and nonequilibrium properties. First we derive a Lieb-Robinson bound which is optimal in the spatial tail. This bound then implies a clustering property with essentially the same power law for the Green's func…
Lieb-Robinson bounds show that the speed of propagation of information under the Heisenberg dynamics in a wide class of non-relativistic quantum lattice systems is essentially bounded. We review work of the past dozen years that has turned this fundamental result into a powerful tool for analyzing quantum lattice systems. We introduce a unified framework for a wide range of applications by studying quasi-locality properties of general classes of maps defined on the algebra of local observables of quantum lattice systems. We also consider a number of generalizations that include systems with an…
Judging by the enormous body of work that it has inspired, Elliott Lieb and Derek Robinson's 1972 article on the "Finite Group Velocity of Quantum Spin Systems" can be regarded as a \emph{high-impact paper}, as research accountants say. But for more than 30 years this major contribution to quantum physics has remained pretty much confidential. Lieb and Robinson's work eventually found a large audience in the years 2000, with the rapid and concomitant development of quantum information theory and experimental platforms enabling the characterisation and manipulation of isolated quantum systems a…
Lieb Robinson bounds quantify the maximal speed of information spreading in nonrelativistic quantum systems. We discuss the relation of Lieb Robinson bounds to out of time order correlators, which correspond to different norms of commutators $C(r,t) = [A_i(t),B_{i+r}]$ of local operators. Using an exact Krylov space time evolution technique, we calculate these two different norms of such commutators for the spin 1/2 Heisenberg chain with interactions decaying as a power law $1/r^α$ with distance $r$. Our numerical analysis shows that both norms (operator norm and normalized Frobenius norm) exh…
The Lieb-Robinson bound states that local Hamiltonian evolution in nonrelativistic quantum mechanical theories gives rise to the notion of an effective light-cone with exponentially decaying tails. We discuss several consequences of this result in the context of quantum information theory. First, we show that the information that leaks out to space-like separated regions is negligable, and that there is a finite speed at which correlations and entanglement can be distributed. Second, we discuss how these ideas can be used to prove lower bounds on the time it takes to convert states without top…
Lieb-Robinson bounds are powerful analytical tools for constraining the dynamic and static properties of non-relativistic quantum systems. Recently, a complete picture for closed systems that evolve unitarily in time has been achieved. In experimental systems, however, interactions with the environment cannot generally be ignored, and the extension of Lieb-Robinson bounds to dissipative systems which evolve non-unitarily in time remains an open challenge. In this work, we prove two Lieb-Robinson bounds that constrain the dynamics of open quantum systems with long-range interactions that decay …
A long standing open problem whether a heat engine with finite power achieves the Carnot efficiency is investigated. We rigorously prove a general trade-off inequality on thermodynamic efficiency and time interval of a cyclic process with quantum heat engines. In a first step, employing the Lieb-Robinson bound we establish an inequality on the change in a local observable caused by an operation far from support of the local observable. This inequality provides a rigorous characterization of the following intuitive picture that most of the energy released from the engine to the cold bath remain…
In this work, we prove a new family of Lieb-Robinson bounds for lattice spin systems with long-range interactions. Our results apply for arbitrary $k$-body interactions, so long as they decay with a power-law greater than $kd$, where $d$ is the dimension of the system. More precisely, we require that the sum of the norm of terms with diameter greater than or equal to $R$, acting on any one site, decays as a power-law $1/R^α$, with $α> d$. These new bounds allow us to prove that, at any fixed time, the spatial decay of quantum information follows arbitrarily closely to $1/r^α$. Moreover, we def…
The propagation of information in non-relativistic quantum systems obeys a speed limit known as a Lieb-Robinson bound. We derive a new Lieb-Robinson bound for systems with interactions that decay with distance $r$ as a power law, $1/r^α$. The bound implies an effective light cone tighter than all previous bounds. Our approach is based on a technique for approximating the time evolution of a system, which was first introduced as part of a quantum simulation algorithm by Haah et al., FOCS'18. To bound the error of the approximation, we use a known Lieb-Robinson bound that is weaker than the boun…
The Lieb-Robinson bound sets a theoretical upper limit on the speed at which information can propagate in non-relativistic quantum spin networks. In its original version, it results in an exponentially exploding function of the evolution time, which is partially mitigated by an exponentially decreasing term that instead depends upon the distance covered by the signal (the ratio between the two exponents effectively defining an upper bound on the propagation speed). In the present paper, by properly accounting for the free parameters of the model, we show how to turn this construction into a st…
