Abstract

In this thesis we present three results about the ferromagnetic quantum XXZ model: 1) Existence of a spectral gap above all infinite-volume ground states in one dimension for any choice of spin S>1/2 ; 2) Characterization of one-dimensional "droplet" states as ground states of the spin-1/2 model with up spin boundary fields; 3) An upper bound for the spectral gap above the spin-1/2 interface ground states in dimension two and higher. The upper bound vanishes as 1/R^2, where R is the linear size of the system. This thesis contains research performed in collboration with other authors: O. Bolina, P. Contucci, T. Koma, B. Nachtergaele.