Response theory for locally gapped systems

We introduce a notion of a \emph{local gap} for interacting many-body quantum lattice systems and prove the validity of response theory and Kubo's formula for localized perturbations in such settings. On a high level, our result shows that the usual spectral gap condition, concerning the system as a whole, is not a necessary condition for understanding local properties of the system. More precisely, we say that an equilibrium state ρ0 of a Hamiltonian H0 is locally gapped in Λgap⊂Λ, whenever the Liouvillian −i[H0,⋅] is almost invertible on local observables supported in Λgap when tested in ρ0. To put this into context, we provide other alternative notions of a local gap and discuss their relations. The validity of response theory is based on the construction of \emph{non-equilibrium almost stationary states} (NEASSs). By controlling locality properties of the NEASS construction, we show that response theory holds to any order, whenever the perturbation \(\epsilon V\) acts in a region which is further than |logϵ| away from the non-gapped region Λ∖Λgap.