2015/02/18 by Tomotaka Kuwahara, Kuwahara, Tomotaka, Itai Arad +5
Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics #FOS: Physical sciences #High Energy Physics - Theory (hep-th) #Mathematical Physics (math-ph) #Quantum Information and Cryptography #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #Quantum many-body systems #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech #hep-th #math-ph #math.MP #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1502.05330
12 revtex pages, 2 pdf figs; minor changes, typos corrected. To be published in Quantum Science and Technology
openalex publication_date 2015/02/18 · arxiv created 2017/01/16 · arxiv updated 2017/01/18 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The low-temperature physics of quantum many-body systems is largely governed by the structure of their ground states. Minimizing the energy of local interactions, ground states often reflect strong properties of locality such as the area law for entanglement entropy and the exponential decay of correlations between spatially separated observables. In this letter we present a novel characterization of locality in quantum states, which we call `local reversibility'. It characterizes the type of operations that are needed to reverse the action of a general disturbance on the state. We prove that unique ground states of gapped local Hamiltonian are locally reversible. This way, we identify new fundamental features of many-body ground states, which cannot be derived from the aforementioned properties. We use local reversibility to distinguish between states enjoying microscopic and macroscopic quantum phenomena. To demonstrate the potential of our approach, we prove specific properties of ground states, which are relevant both to critical and non-critical theories.