Quantum Wielandt's inequality gives an optimal upper bound on the minimal length k such that length-k products of elements in a generating system span M-n(C). It is conjectured that k should be of order O(n(2)) in general. In this paper, we give an overview of how the question has been studied in the literature so far and its relation to a classical question in linear algebra, namely the length of the algebra M-n(C). We provide a generic version of quantum Wielandt's inequality, which gives the optimal length with probability one. More specifically, we prove based on [1] that k generically is of order Theta(log n), as opposed to the general case, in which the best bound to date is O(n(2) log n). Our result implies a new bound on the primitivity index of a random quantum channel. Furthermore, we shed new light on a long-standing open problem for Projected Entangled Pair State, by concluding that almost any translation-invariant PEPS (in particular, Matrix Product State) with periodic boundary conditions on a grid with side length of order Omega(log n) is the unique ground state of a local Hamiltonian. We observe similar characteristics for matrix Lie algebras and provide numerical results for random Lie-generating systems.

Given a finite-range, translation-invariant commuting system Hamiltonian on a spin chain, we show that the Davies semigroup describing the reduced dynamics resulting from the joint Hamiltonian evolution of a spin chain weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalizes rapidly at any temperature. More precisely, we prove that the relative entropy between any evolved state and the equilibrium Gibbs state contracts exponentially fast with an exponent that scales logarithmically with the length of the chain. Our theorem extends a seminal result of Holley and Stroock (Commun Math Phys 123(1):85-93, 1989) to the quantum setting as well as provides an exponential improvement over the non-closure of the gap proved by Brandao and Kastoryano (Commun Math Phys 344(3):915-957, 2016). This has wide-ranging applications to the study of many-body in and out-of-equilibrium quantum systems. Our proof relies upon a recently derived strong decay of correlations for Gibbs states of one dimensional, translation-invariant local Hamiltonians, and tools from the theory of operator spaces.

We prove that spin chains weakly coupled to a large heat bath thermalize rapidly at any temperature for finite-range, translation-invariant commuting Hamiltonians, reaching equilibrium in a time which scales logarithmically with the system size. This generalizes to the quantum regime a seminal result of Holley and Stroock from 1989 for classical spin chains and represents an exponential improvement over previous bounds based on the nonclosure of the spectral gap. We discuss the implications in the context of dissipative phase transitions and in the study of symmetry protected topological phases.

The thermal equilibrium properties of physical systems can be described using Gibbs states. It is therefore of great interest to know when such states allow for an easy description. In particular, this is the case if correlations between distant regions are small. In this work, we consider 1D quantum spin systems with local, finite-range, translation-invariant interactions at any temperature. In this setting, we show that Gibbs states satisfy uniform exponential decay of correlations and, moreover, the mutual information between two regions decays exponentially with their distance, irrespective of the temperature. In order to prove the latter, we show that exponential decay of correlations of the infinite-chain thermal states, exponential uniform clustering and exponential decay of the mutual information are equivalent for 1D quantum spin systems with local, finite-range interactions at any temperature. In particular, Araki's seminal results yields that the three conditions hold in the translation-invariant case. The methods we use are based on the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy and on techniques developed by Araki. Moreover, we find that the Gibbs states of the systems we consider are superexponentially close to saturating the data-processing inequality for the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy.

In this paper, we derive a new generalisation of the strong subadditivity of the entropy to the setting of general conditional expectations onto arbitrary finite-dimensional von Neumann algebras. This generalisation, referred to as approximate tensorization of the relative entropy, consists in a lower bound for the sum of relative entropies between a given density and its respective projections onto two intersecting von Neumann algebras in terms of the relative entropy between the same density and its projection onto an algebra in the intersection, up to multiplicative and additive constants. In particular, our inequality reduces to the so-called quasi-factorization of the entropy for commuting algebras, which is a key step in modern proofs of the logarithmic Sobolev inequality for classical lattice spin systems. We also provide estimates on the constants in terms of conditions of clustering of correlations in the setting of quantum lattice spin systems. Along the way, we show the equivalence between conditional expectations arising from Petz recovery maps and those of general Davies semigroups.

Quasi-factorization-type inequalities for the relative entropy have recently proven to be fundamental in modern proofs of modified logarithmic Sobolev inequalities for quantum spin systems. In this paper, we show some results of weak quasi-factorization for the Belavkin-Staszewski relative entropy, i.e. upper bounds for the BS-entropy between two bipartite states in terms of the sum of two conditional BS-entropies, up to some multiplicative and additive factors.

Given a uniform, frustration-free family of local Lindbladians defined on a quantum lattice spin system in any spatial dimension, we prove a strong exponential convergence in relative entropy of the system to equilibrium under a condition of spatial mixing of the stationary Gibbs states and the rapid decay of the relative entropy on finite-size blocks. Our result leads to the first examples of the positivity of the modified logarithmic Sobolev inequality for quantum lattice spin systems independently of the system size. Moreover, we show that our notion of spatial mixing is a consequence of the recent quantum generalization of Dobrushin and Shlosman's complete analyticity of the free-energy at equilibrium. The latter typically holds above a critical temperature Tc. Our results have wide-ranging applications in quantum information. As an illustration, we discuss four of them: first, using techniques of quantum optimal transport, we show that a quantum annealer subject to a finite range classical noise will output an energy close to that of the fixed point after constant annealing time. Second, we prove Gaussian concentration inequalities for Lipschitz observables and show that the eigenstate thermalization hypothesis holds for certain high-temperture Gibbs states. Third, we prove a finite blocklength refinement of the quantum Stein lemma for the task of asymmetric discrimination of two Gibbs states of commuting Hamiltonians satisfying our conditions. Fourth, in the same setting, our results imply the existence of a local quantum circuit of logarithmic depth to prepare Gibbs states of a class of commuting Hamiltonians.

The mixing time of Markovian dissipative evolutions of open quantum many-body systems can be bounded using optimal constants of certain quantum functional inequalities, such as the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant. For classical spin systems, the positivity of such constants follows from a mixing condition for the Gibbs measure via quasi-factorization results for the entropy. Inspired by the classical case, we present a strategy to derive the positivity of the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant associated with the dynamics of certain quantum systems from some clustering conditions on the Gibbs state of a local, commuting Hamiltonian. In particular, we show that for the heat-bath dynamics of 1D systems, the modified logarithmic Sobolev constant is positive under the assumptions of a mixing condition on the Gibbs state and a strong quasi-factorization of the relative entropy.