The spectral gap problem - determining whether the energy spectrum of a
system has an energy gap above ground state, or if there is a continuous range
of low-energy excitations - pervades quantum many-body physics. Recently, this
important problem was shown to be undecidable for quantum spin systems in two
(or more) spatial dimensions: there exists no algorithm that determines in
general whether a system is gapped or gapless, a result which has many
unexpected consequences for the physics of such systems. However, there are
many indications that one dimensional spin systems are simpler than their
higher-dimensional counterparts: for example, they cannot have thermal phase
transitions or topological order, and there exist highly-effective numerical
algorithms such as DMRG - and even provably polynomial-time ones - for gapped
1D systems, exploiting the fact that such systems obey an entropy area-law.
Furthermore, the spectral gap undecidability construction crucially relied on
aperiodic tilings, which are not possible in 1D.
So does the spectral gap problem become decidable in 1D? In this paper we
prove this is not the case, by constructing a family of 1D spin chains with
translationally-invariant nearest neighbour interactions for which no algorithm
can determine the presence of a spectral gap. This not only proves that the
spectral gap of 1D systems is just as intractable as in higher dimensions, but
also predicts the existence of qualitatively new types of complex physics in 1D
spin chains. In particular, it implies there are 1D systems with constant
spectral gap and non-degenerate classical ground state for all systems sizes up
to an uncomputably large size, whereupon they switch to a gapless behaviour
with dense spectrum.Comment: 7 figure
