Department of Mathematics

We analyze a class of quantum spin models defined on half-spaces in the $d$-dimensional hypercubic lattice bounded by a hyperplane with inward unit normal vector $m\in\mathbb{R}^d$. The family of models was previously introduced as the single species Product Vacua with Boundary States (PVBS) model, which is a spin-$1/2$ model with a XXZ-type nearest neighbor interactions depending on parameters $\lambda_j\in (0,\infty)$, one for each coordinate direction. For any given values of the parameters, we prove an upper bound for the spectral gap above the unique ground state of these models, which vanishes for exactly one direction of the normal vector $m$. For all other choices of $m$ we derive a positive lower bound of the spectral gap, except for the case $\lambda_1 =\cdots =\lambda_d=1$, which is known to have gapless excitations in the bulk.