Clustering of conditional mutual information for quantum Gibbs states above a threshold temperature

Abstract

We prove that the quantum Gibbs states of spin systems above a certain threshold temperature are approximate quantum Markov networks, meaning that the conditional mutual information decays rapidly with distance. We demonstrate the exponential decay for short-ranged interacting systems and power-law decay for long-ranged interacting systems. Consequently, we establish the efficiency of quantum Gibbs sampling algorithms, a strong version of the area law, the quasi-locality of effective Hamiltonians on subsystems, a clustering theorem for mutual information, and a polynomial-time algorithm for classical Gibbs state simulations.