Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2014 / iii / Paper 63 / 4 / b

Sum the spectral filtering of Hamiltonian terms over the original finite decomposition. The total Hamiltonian operator commutes with its own evolution, soThe absence of all ground-to-excited matrix elements, proved in part (a), makes each filtered term block diagonal relative to $P_0=|{\varphi }_0⟩⟨{\varphi }_0|$ and its orthogonal complement. ThereforeA filtered term may act on the whole system, since unitary time evolution spreads its original support. Neither commutation with $P_0$ nor preservation of its ground-state expectation asserts that the global ground state minimizes each individual term. In particular, this construction does not generally turn a frustrated decomposition into a frustration-free Hamiltonian.