In person (245 Altgeld) and via Zoom:
https://illinois.zoom.us/j/88440920027?pwd=dmdyeXI4RkFkUDBacUN2cVp0TjN0QT09
Abstract: Quantum spin systems are many-body physical models where particles are bound to the sites of a lattice. These are widely used throughout condensed matter physics and quantum information theory, and are of particular interest in the classification of quantum phases of matter. By pinning down the properties of new exotic phases of matter, researchers have opened the door to developing new quantum technologies.
One of the fundamental quantitites for this classification is whether or not the Hamiltonian has a spectral gap above its ground state energy in the thermodynamic limit. Mathematically, the Hamiltonian is a self-adjoint operator and the set of possible energies is given by its spectrum, which is bounded from below. While the importance of the spectral gap is well known, very few methods exist for establishing if a model is gapped, and the majority of known results are for one-dimensional systems. Moreover, the existence of a non-vanishing gap is generically undecidable which makes it necessary to develop new techniques for estimating spectral gaps. In this talk, I will discuss my work proving non-vanishing spectral gaps for key quantum spin models, and developing new techniques for producing lower bound estimates on the gap. Two important models with longstanding spectral gap questions that I recently contributed progress to are the AKLT model on the hexagonal lattice, and Haldane's pseudo-potentials for the fractional quantum Hall effect. Once a gap has been proved, a natural next question is whether it is typical of a gapped phase. This can be positively answered by showing that the gap is robust in the presence of perturbations.
Ensuring the gap remains open in the presence of perturbations is also of interest, e.g., for the development of robust quantum memory. A second topic I will discuss is my research studying spectral gap stability.
