Beyond the Gap: What Imaginary-Time Evolution Reveals About the Edge of the Continuum

Abstract

The spectral gap, the energy separating the ground state from the first excitation, governs many quantum phenomena, yet it is far harder to compute than the ground state. We propose a mathematically rigorous method for extracting the gap from imaginary-time evolution in infinite-dimensional Hamiltonians, where the first excitation typically marks the edge of a continuous spectrum. We show that a gap is not automatically detected: detection depends on how the initial state and observable couple the ground state to excitations at the bottom of the continuum. When this coupling follows a power law, the gap is recovered together with a logarithmic correction whose coefficient yields the exponent of the spectral density near the edge of the continuum, which reflects the physics of the excitations. We confirm both predictions numerically for an exactly solvable model. Our results offer a new numerical approach to many-body quantum physics, in which both the gap and the threshold exponent are obtained merely at the cost of a ground-state calculation.