Finite group velocity implies locality of interactions

Spin systems with exponentially decaying k-body interactions have an effective finite group velocity for the propagation of correlations due to Lieb-Robinson bounds. We show that a finite group velocity conversely implies the locality of the underlying Hamiltonian: a system fulfills Lieb-Robinson bounds in exponential form if and only if the underlying interactions decay exponentially in space. Our result already follows from the behaviour of two-point correlation functions for single-site observables and generalizes to different decay behaviours. As a side-result, we thus find that Lieb-Robinson bounds for single-site observables imply Lieb-Robinson bounds for arbitrary bounded observables. In addition we show that our results generalize to fermionic lattice models.