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arXiv:1003.1047 · Physical Review A

Tensor operators: Constructions and applications for long-range interaction systems

Florian Fröwis, Volckmar Nebendahl, Wolfgang Dür

Published Jun 25, 2010• 85 citations
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Abstract

We consider the representation of operators in terms of tensor networks and their application to the ground-state approximation and time evolution of systems with long-range interactions. We provide an explicit construction to represent an arbitrary many-body Hamilton operator in terms of a one-dimensional tensor network (i.e., as a matrix product operator). For pairwise interactions, we show that such a representation is always efficient and requires a tensor dimension growing only linearly with the number of particles. For systems obeying certain symmetries or restrictions we find optimal representations with minimal tensor dimension. We discuss the analytic and numerical approximation of operators in terms of low-dimensional tensor operators. We demonstrate applications for time evolution and the ground-state approximation, in particular for long-range interaction with inhomogeneous couplings. The operator representations are also generalized to other geometries such as trees and two-dimensional lattices, where we show how to obtain and use efficient tensor network representations respecting a given geometry.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.81.062337

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We consider the representation of operators in terms of tensor networks and their application to the ground-state approximation and time evolution of systems with long-range interactions. We provide an explicit construction to represent an arbitrary many-body Hamilton operator in terms of a one-dimensional tensor network (i.e., as a matrix product operator). For pairwise interactions, we show that such a representation is always efficient and requires a tensor dimension growing only linearly with the number of particles. For systems obeying certain symmetries or restrictions we find optimal representations with minimal tensor dimension. We discuss the analytic and numerical approximation of operators in terms of low-dimensional tensor operators. We demonstrate applications for time evolution and the ground-state approximation, in particular for long-range interaction with inhomogeneous couplings. The operator representations are also generalized to other geometries such as trees and two-dimensional lattices, where we show how to obtain and use efficient tensor network representations respecting a given geometry.
Abstract. Compactly representing and efficently applying linear operators are fundamental ingredients in tensor network methods for simulating quantum many-body problems and solving high-dimensional problems in scientific computing. In this work, we study such representations for tree tensor networks, the so-called tree tensor network operators (TTNOs), paying particular attention to Hamiltonian operators that involve long-range pairwise interactions between particles. Generalizing the work by Lin, Tong, and others on matrix product operators, we establish a direct connection between the hierarchical low-rank structure of the interaction matrix and the TTNO property. This connection allows us to arrive at very compact TTNO representations by compressing the interaction matrix into a hierarchically semiseparable matrix. Numerical experiments for different quantum spin systems validate our results and highlight the potential advantages of TTNOs over matrix product operators.
Simulating many-body open quantum systems is an extremely challenging problem, with methods often restricted to either models with nearest-neighbor interactions or semi-classical approximations. In particular, modeling two-dimensional systems with realistic long-range interactions, in addition to dissipation, is of vital importance to the development of modern quantum computing and simulation platforms. In this paper, we present a construction of the time-evolution operator, as a projected entangled pair operator (denoted tePEPO), that can be used to evolve a tensor network ansatz through time. Interactions beyond nearest-neighbor, including interactions between sites not collinear in the lattice, can be represented efficiently as a tePEPO. Furthermore, we obtain approximations to realistic radial long-range interactions decaying with a power-law, that give accurate results with small tePEPO bond dimension. Finally, we consider a physical example of a Rydberg atom Hamiltonian with long-range dipolar interactions, and show evidence of a dipole-dipole blockading effect in presence of dissipation. This work demonstrates the applicability of tensor networks to two-dimensional systems widely studied in experiments, but previously inaccessible to non-semi-classical methods.
Strongly correlated systems exhibit phenomena -- such as high-T_c superconductivity or the fractional quantum Hall effect -- that are not explicable by classical and semi-classical methods. Moreover, due to the exponential scaling of the associated Hilbert space, solving the proposed model Hamiltonians by brute-force numerical methods is bound to fail. Thus, it is important to develop novel numerical and analytical methods that can explain the physics in this regime. Tensor Network states are quantum many-body states that help to overcome some of these difficulties by defining a family of states that depend only on a small number of parameters. Their use is twofold: they are used as variational ansatzes in numerical algorithms as well as providing a framework to represent a large class of exactly solvable models that are believed to represent all possible phases of matter. The present thesis investigates mathematical properties of these states thus deepening the understanding of how and why Tensor Networks are suitable for the description of quantum many-body systems. It is believed that tensor networks can represent ground states of local Hamiltonians, but how good is this representation? This question is of fundamental importance as variational algorithms based on tensor networks can only perform well if any ground state can be approximated efficiently in such a way. While any state can be written as a tensor network state, the number of parameters needed for the description might be too large. This is not the case for one-dimensional systems: only a few parameters are required to have a good approximation of their ground states; that, in turn, allows for numerical algorithms based on tensor networks performing well. The situation in two dimensions is somewhat more complicated, but it is known that ground states of local Hamiltonians can be expressed as tensor networks with sub-exponentially many parameters. In the present thesis, we improve on these existing bounds strengthening the claim that the language of tensor networks is suitable to describe many-body systems. Another central question is how symmetries of the system such as translational invariance, time-reversal symmetry or local unitary symmetry can be reflected in tensor networks. This question is important as systems appearing in nature might intrinsically possess certain symmetries; on one hand, understanding these symmetries simplifies the description of these systems. On the other hand, the presence of symmetries leads to the appearance of novel phases -- symmetry-protected topological (SPT) order, -- and tensor networks provide the right language to classify these phases. In one dimension and for certain classes of two-dimensional tensor networks (states generated by so-called injective tensors) it is well understood how symmetries of the state can be described. A general framework, however, has yet to be developed. In the present thesis, we contribute to the development of the theory in two ways. We first investigate the question for injective tensors, and generalize the existing proof for any geometry including the hyperbolic geometry used in the AdS/CFT correspondence. Second, we introduce a class of tensor network states that include previously known examples of states exhibiting SPT order. We show how symmetries are reflected in these states thus deepening the understanding of SPT order in two dimensions.
We introduce the concept of concatenated tensor networks to efficiently describe quantum states. We show that the corresponding concatenated tensor network states can efficiently describe time evolution and possess arbitrary block-wise entanglement and long-ranged correlations. We illustrate the approach for the enhancement of matrix product states, i.e. one-dimensional (1D) tensor networks, where we replace each of the matrices of the original matrix product state with another 1D tensor network. This procedure yields a 2D tensor network, which includes—already for tensor dimension 2—all states that can be prepared by circuits of polynomially many (possibly non-unitary) two-qubit quantum operations, as well as states resulting from time evolution with respect to Hamiltonians with short-ranged interactions. We investigate the possibility of efficiently extracting information from these states, which serves as the basic step in a variational optimization procedure. To this aim, we utilize the known exact and approximate methods for 2D tensor networks and demonstrate some improvements thereof, which are also applicable e.g. in the context of 2D projected entangled pair states. We generalize the approach to higher dimensional and tree tensor networks.
Tensor network operators, such as the matrix product operator (MPO) and the projected entangled-pair operator (PEPO), can provide efficient representation of certain linear operators in high-dimensional spaces. This paper focuses on the efficient representation of tensor network operators with long-range pairwise interactions such as the Coulomb interaction. For MPOs, we find that all existing efficient methods exploit an upper-triangular low-rank (UTLR) property, i.e., the upper-triangular part of the matrix can be well approximated by a low-rank matrix, while the matrix itself can be full-rank. This allows us to convert the problem of finding the efficient MPO representation into a matrix completion problem. We develop a modified incremental singular value decomposition method (ISVD) to solve this ill-conditioned matrix completion problem. This algorithm yields equivalent MPO representation to that developed in [E. M. Stoudenmire and S. R. White, Phys. Rev. Lett., 119 (2017), 046401]. In order to efficiently treat more general tensor network operators, we develop another strategy for compressing tensor network operators based on hierarchical low-rank matrix formats, such as the hierarchical off-diagonal low-rank (HODLR) format and the H\mathcal{H}H-matrix format. Though the preconstant in the complexity is larger, the advantage of using the hierarchical low-rank matrix format is that it is applicable to both MPOs and PEPOs. For the Coulomb interaction, the operator can be represented by a linear combination of O(log⁡(N)log⁡(N/ϵ))\mathcal{O}(\log(N)\log(N/\epsilon))O(log(N)log(N/ϵ)) MPOs/PEPOs, each with a constant bond dimension, where NNN is the system size and ϵ\epsilonϵ is the accuracy of the low-rank truncation. Neither the modified ISVD nor the hierarchical low-rank algorithm assumes that the long-range interaction takes a translation-invariant form.
Abstract We provide an exact construction of particular Hamitonians on a one-dimensional lattice as matrix product operators, a type of tensor network. Namely, we consider Hamiltonians describing interactions between degrees of freedom at lattice sites whose strength grows with the lattice site separation as a polynomial multiplied by an exponential. We show that the bond dimension is ( k + 3) for a polynomial of order k , independent of the system size and the number of particles. Our construction is manifestly translationally invariant, and so may be used in finite- or infinite-size variational matrix product state algorithms. Our results provide new insight into the correlation structure of many-body quantum operators, and may also be practical in simulations of many-body systems whose interactions are exponentially screened at large distances, but may have complex short-distance structure.