Long-Range Interacting Systems Are Locally Noninteracting

Abstract

Enhanced experimental capabilities to control nonlocal and power-law decaying interactions are currently fueling intense research in the domain of quantum many-body physics. Compared to their counterparts with short-ranged interactions, long-range interacting systems display novel physics, such as nonlinear light cones for the propagation of information or inequivalent thermodynamic ensembles. In this work, we consider generic long-range open quantum systems in arbitrary dimensions and focus on the so-called strong long-range regime. We prove that in the thermodynamic limit local properties, captured by reduced quantum states, are described by an emergent noninteracting theory. Here, the dynamics factorizes and the individual constituents of the system evolve independently such that no correlations are generated over time. In this sense, long-range interacting systems are locally noninteracting. This has significant implications for their relaxation behavior, for instance, in relation to the emergence of long-lived quasistationary states or to the absence of thermalization.