Extensions of the Haldane gap proof: higher dimensions, near degeneracy, fermions and tensor-network states

Abstract

A recent remarkable paper by OpenAI showed that the spin-one Heisenberg chain with periodic boundary conditions has a spectral gap in the thermodynamic limit. The proof elegantly deduces this gap from the Hamiltonian's spectrum on a finite system. This basic idea is an inequality involving the purity of the original Gibbs state and a dual Gibbs state that is defined via space-time rotation. Here we consider a few generalizations of this purity bootstrap argument. We first extend it to arbitrary spatial dimensions. Our main result uses the space-time duality between symmetry generators and symmetry twists to obtain upper bounds on the splitting of nearly degenerate low-energy states, together with a nonzero gap above them, from finite-system information. As applications, we show that finite-system calculations for the 2+1-D toric code in a field and the 2+1-D transverse-field Ising model establish parameter regimes with four and two low-lying states whose splittings are bounded from above by $e^{-cL}$ and $e^{-cL^2}$ respectively for arbitrarily large system size $L$, while the gap above these states remains nonzero in the thermodynamic limit. Next, we extend it to fermionic systems and use a finite calculation to establish a symmetric mass generation phase in a $2+1$-D fermionic model. Finally, we apply the bootstrap to tensor-network states and establish exponential decay of connected correlations of all local operators in the symmetric square-lattice spin-one state introduced by Jian and Zaletel.