An area law and sub-exponential algorithm for 1D systems

We give a new proof for the area law for general 1D gapped systems, which exponentially improves Hastings’ famous result [1]. Specifically, we show that for a chain of d-dimensional spins, governed by a 1D local Hamiltonian with a spectral gap > 0, the entanglement entropy of the ground state with respect to any cut in the chain is upper bounded by O( log 3 d ). Our approach uses the framework of Refs. [2, 3] to construct a Chebyshev-based AGSP (Approximate Ground Space Projection) with favorable factors. However, our construction uses the Hamiltonian directly, instead of using the Detectability lemma, which allows us to work with general (frustrated) Hamiltonians, as well as slightly improving the 1/ dependence of the bound in Ref. [3]. To achieve that, we establish a new, “random-walk like”, bound on the entanglement rank of an arbitrary power of a 1D Hamiltonian, which might be of independent interest: ER(H) ≤ (`d)O( √ . Finally, treating d as a constant, our AGSP shows that the ground state is well approximated by a matrix product state with a sublinear bond dimension B = eÕ(log 3/4 n/ 1/4). Using this in conjunction with known dynamical programing algorithms, yields an algorithm for a 1/poly(n) approximation of the ground energy with a subexponential running time T ≤ exp ( eÕ(log 3/4 n/ ) ) .