We study quantum chains whose Hamiltonians are perturbations by bounded interactions of short range of a Hamiltonian that does not couple the degrees of freedom located at different sites of… Click to show full abstract
We study quantum chains whose Hamiltonians are perturbations by bounded interactions of short range of a Hamiltonian that does not couple the degrees of freedom located at different sites of the chain and has a strictly positive energy gap above its ground-state energy. We prove that, for small values of a coupling constant, the spectral gap of the perturbed Hamiltonian above its ground-state energy is bounded from below by a positive constant uniformly in the length of the chain. In our proof we use a novel method based on local Lie-Schwinger conjugations of the Hamiltonians associated with connected subsets of the chain.
               
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