Unfrustrated qudit chains and their ground states

Abstract

We investigate chains of d-dimensional quantum spins (qudits) on a line with generic nearest-neighbor interactions without translational invariance. We find the conditions under which these systems are not frustrated, that is, when the ground states are also the common ground states of all the local terms in the Hamiltonians. The states of a quantum spin chain are naturally represented in the matrix product states (MPS) framework. Using imaginary time evolution in the MPS ansatz, we numerically investigate the range of parameters in which we expect the ground states to be highly entangled and find them hard to approximate using our MPS method.