Lieb-Robinson bounds imply locality of interactions

Discrete lattice models are a cornerstone of quantum many-body physics. They arise as effective descriptions of condensed-matter systems and lattice-regularized quantum field theories. Lieb-Robinson bounds imply that if the degrees of freedom at each lattice site only interact locally with each other, correlations can only propagate with a finite group velocity through the lattice, similarly to a light cone in relativistic systems. Here we show that Lieb-Robinson bounds are equivalent to the locality of the interactions: a system with k-body interactions fulfills Lieb-Robinson bounds in exponential form if and only if the underlying interactions decay exponentially in space. In particular, our result already follows from the behavior of two-point correlation functions for single-site observables and generalizes to different decay behaviors as well as fermionic lattice models. As a side result, we thus find that Lieb-Robinson bounds for single-site observables imply Lieb-Robinson bounds for bounded observables with arbitrary support.