A convergent hierarchy of spectral gap certificates for qubit Hamiltonians

Abstract: We give a convergent hierarchy of SDP certificates for bounding the spectral gap of local qubit Hamiltonians from below. Our approach is based on the NPA hierarchy applied to a polynomially-sized system of constraints defining the universal enveloping algebra of the Lie algebra $\mathfrak{su}(2^{n})$, as well as additional constraints which put restrictions on the corresponding representations of the algebra. We also use as input an upper bound on the ground state energy, either using a hierarchy introduced by Fawzi, Fawzi, and Scalet, or an analog for qubit Hamiltonians of the Lasserre hierarchy of upper bounds introduced by Klep, Magron, Mass\'{e}, and Vol\v{c}i\v{c}. The convergence of the certificates does not require that the Hamiltonian be frustration-free. We prove that the resulting certificates have polynomial size at fixed degree and converge asymptotically (in fact, at level $n$), by showing that all allowed representations of the algebra correspond to the second exterior power $\wedge^2(\mathbb{C}^{2^n})$, which encodes the sum of the two smallest eigenvalues of the original Hamiltonian. We also give an example showing that for a commuting 1-local Hamiltonian, the hierarchy certifies a nontrivial lower bound on the spectral gap.