Parent Hamiltonians of Ergodic Matrix Product States

Matrix product states (MPS) are quintessential examples of frustration-free gapped ground states of local interactions called parent Hamiltonians.

In this work, we investigate parent Hamiltonians for a class of ergodic matrix product states (EMPS), which are MPS defined by site-dependent random tensors $\{X_j^{[k]}\}_{j=1}^D$ which are homogeneously distributed at every site $k$ in the spin chain.

Here, the EMPS are not translation-invariant but rather statistically translation-invariant.

Under a mild injectivity assumption, we show the thermodynamic limit of an EMPS is the unique frustration-free ground state of a parent Hamiltonian on the whole spin chain, which, depending on the statistical properties of the EMPS, may or may not be finite-range.

In contrast to the translation-invariant regime, these Hamiltonians need not be gapped.

Nevertheless, applying the martingale method while keeping track of local statistics gives conditions for a gap, in addition to pointing towards why there need not be a gap in general.

We include examples of EMPS both with and without spectral gaps to illustrate our results.