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Toward a Structure Theory for Disordered Matrix Product States

Mathematical Physics Seminar

Speaker: Eric Roon, Michigan State University
Location: 3024 QMAP
Start time: Mon, May 12 2025, 11:00AM

In 1992, Fannes, Nachtergaele, and Werner classified finitely correlated translation-invariant states on quantum spin chains and discovered that they admit a matrix product structure. Such matrix products states are simultaneously good approximations for general states, and natural candidates for ground states of specific local Hamiltonians. Following the observation by Vidal (2004) that matrix products states are ‘efficient,’ the theory took root and is now an indispensable tool in many-body physics and quantum simulation. Recent work in this direction by Movassagh—Schenker (2022) and Nelson—R. (2024) adapted this structure to states generated by disordered matrix products. Nelson—R. showed such disordered matrix product states are translation co-variant with respect to an ergodic map. However both works above only had a ‘one-way’ construction, not a classification. In this talk, I’ll report on some work in progress with Jeffrey Schenker where we study disordered translation co-variant states in the case that the underlying probability space is a compact Hausdorff space. Time permitting, we will also discuss an interesting example of such a state.