English

Classification of locality preserving symmetries on spin chains

Quantum Physics 2025-05-12 v2 Strongly Correlated Electrons Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We consider the action of a finite group GG by locality preserving automorphisms (quantum cellular automata) on quantum spin chains. We refer to such group actions as ``symmetries''. The natural notion of equivalence for such symmetries is \emph{stable equivalence}, which allows for stacking with factorized group actions. Stacking also endows the set of equivalence classes with a group structure. We prove that the anomaly of such symmetries provides an isomorphism between the group of stable equivalence classes of symmetries with the cohomology group H3(G,U(1))H^3(G,U(1)), consistent with previous conjectures. This amounts to a complete classification of locality preserving symmetries on spin chains. We further show that a locality preserving symmetry is stably equivalent to one that can be presented by finite depth quantum circuits with covariant gates if and only if the slant product of its anomaly is trivial in H2(G,U(1)[G])H^2(G, U(1)[G]).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.15088,
  title  = {Classification of locality preserving symmetries on spin chains},
  author = {Alex Bols and Wojciech De Roeck and Michiel De Wilde and Bruno de O. Carvalho},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.15088},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

24 pages, 4 figures, Fixed an error in the proof of Lemma 5.6 from the previous version