The stability of free fermi Hamiltonians

Abstract

Recent results have shown the stability of frustration-free Hamiltonians to weak local perturbations, assuming several conditions. In this paper, we prove the stability of free fermion Hamiltonians which are gapped and local. These free fermion Hamiltonians are not necessarily frustration-free, but we are able to adapt previous work to prove stability. The key idea is to add an additional copy of the system to cancel topological obstructions. We comment on applications to quantization of Hall conductance in such systems.