2017/03/31 by J. Ignacio Cirac, David Perez-Garcia, Norbert Schuch +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.str-el #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1742-5468/aa7e55
published as J. Stat. Mech. (2017) 083105 · v2: Minor corrections. See also the related work arXiv:1704.01943 by Sahinoglu et al
arxiv created 2017/05/06 · arxiv updated 2017/08/21
Matrix Product Vectors form the appropriate framework to study and classify one-dimensional quantum systems. In this work, we develop the structure theory of Matrix Product Unitary operators (MPUs) which appear e.g. in the description of time evolutions of one-dimensional systems. We prove that all MPUs have a strict causal cone, making them Quantum Cellular Automata (QCAs), and derive a canonical form for MPUs which relates different MPU representations of the same unitary through a local gauge. We use this canonical form to prove an Index Theorem for MPUs which gives the precise conditions under which two MPUs are adiabatically connected, providing an alternative derivation to that of [Commun. Math. Phys. 310, 419 (2012), arXiv:0910.3675] for QCAs. We also discuss the effect of symmetries on the MPU classification. In particular, we characterize the tensors corresponding to MPU that are invariant under conjugation, time reversal, or transposition. In the first case, we give a full characterization of all equivalence classes. Finally, we give several examples of MPU possessing different symmetries.