Geometry and Quantum Theory Seminar

Speaker: Daniel Spiegel, Harvard

Title: The Quasi-Adiabatic Theorem and All That

Abstract: Yosuke Kubota has recently made progress on understanding Kitaev’s conjecture by constructing a loop spectrum consisting of spaces of quantum spin systems, indexed by spatial dimension of the lattice (arXiv: 2503.12618). After a brief reminder on the C*-algebraic formalism of quantum spin systems, I will discuss Section 2 of this paper, which covers some of the more analytical tools used to construct the loop spectrum. In particular, I will focus on the quasi-adiabatic theorem which roughly speaking states that a smooth path of gapped Hamiltonians with unique ground states gives rise to a path of nice automorphisms that map the ground state at time zero to the path of ground states.