The reviewers contacted by the editors to evaluate this work have been unable to confirm that the main results are correct. Flaws that were identified by the reviewers in earlier versions of the paper have been addressed by the author. Although it is possible that future research will uncover a significant mistake in this paper or show that the conclusions are in error, I believe that publishing it may benefit the readership of the Journal and stimulate further work in mathematical physics on an important topic.

We present a recent result on the existence of the dynamics in the thermodynamic limit of a class of anharmonic quantum oscillator lattices, which was obtained using Lieb--Robinson bounds.

This article is a short introduction to the general topic of quantum spin systems. After a brief sketch of the history of the subject, the standard mathematical framework for formulating problems and results in quantum spin systems is described. Then, three short sections are devoted to Spontaneaous Symmetry Breaking, Phase transitions, and Dynamcis.

This paper is a short review of recent results on interface states in the Falicov-Kimball model and the ferromagnetic XXZ Heisenberg model. More specifically, we discuss the following topics: 1) The existence of interfaces in quantum lattice models that can be considered as perturbations of classical models. 2) The rigidity of the 111 interface in the three-dimensional Falicov-Kimball model at sufficiently low temperatures. 3) The low-lying excitations and the scaling of the gap in the 111 interface ground state in the ferromagnetic XXZ Heisenberg model in three dimensions. 4) The existence of droplet states in the XXZ chain and their properties.

In their 1978 paper, Dyson, Lieb, and Simon (DLS) proved the existence of Ne'el order at positive temperature for the spin-S Heisenberg antiferromagnet on the d-dimensional hypercubic lattice when either S >= 1 and d >= 3 or S=1/2 and d is sufficiently large. This was the first proof of spontaneous breaking of a continuous symmetry in a quantum model at finite temperature. Since then the ideas of DLS have been extended and adapted to a variety of other problems. In this paper I will present an overview of the most important developments in the study of the Heisenberg model and related quantum lattice systems since 1978, including but not restricted to those directly related to the paper by DLS.

This is a short review on the applications of Lieb-Robinson bounds for a general readership of mathematical physicists.

We study the family of spin-S quantum spin chains with a nearest neighbor interaction given by the negative of the singlet projection operator. Using a random loop representation of the partition function in the limit of zero temperature and standard techniques of classical statistical mechanics, we prove dimerization for all sufficiently large values of S.

We supply the mathematical arguments required to complete the proofs of two previously published results: Lieb-Robinson bounds for the dynamics of quantum lattice systems with unbounded on-site terms in the Hamiltonian and the existence of the thermodynamic limit of the dynamics of such systems.

For a large class of finite-range quantum spin models with half-integer spins, we prove that uniqueness of the ground state implies the existence of a low-lying excited state. For systems of linear size L, of arbitrary finite dimension, we obtain an upper bound on the excitation energy (i.e., the gap above the ground state) of the form (C\log L)/L. This result can be regarded as a multi-dimensional Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem and provides a rigorous proof of a recent result by Hastings.

We introduce a two dimensional nonlinear XY model with a second order phase transition driven by spin waves, together with a first order phase transition in the bond variables between two bond ordered phases, one with local ferromagnetic order and another with local antiferromagnetic order. We also prove that at the transition temperature the bond-ordered phases coexist with a disordered phase as predicted by Domany, Schick and Swendsen. This last result generalizes the result of Shlosman and van Enter (cond-mat/0205455). We argue that these phenomena are quite general and should occur for a large class of potentials.