Universal Error Bound for Constrained Quantum Dynamics

In quantum mechanics, the existence of large energy gaps allows us to trace out the degrees of freedom of irrelevant energy scale. Consequently, we can treat a system within a constrained subspace obtained by the projection of the total Hilbert space. While this statement has widely been used to approximate quantum dynamics in various contexts, a general and quantitative justification stays lacking.

In this talk, we show a universal and rigorous error bound for such a constrained-dynamics approximation in generic gapped quantum systems [1,2]. This universal bound is a linear function of time that only involves the energy gap and coupling strength, provided that the latter is much smaller than the former. If time allows, I will briefly talk about generalizations of our result to e.g., quantum many-body systems and open quantum systems.