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arXiv:1006.2639 · Physical Review E

Dynamical simulations of classical stochastic systems using matrix product states

T. H. Johnson, Stephen R. L. Clark, Dieter Jaksch

Published Sep 16, 2010• 44 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We adapt the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, originally devised to simulate the dynamics of one-dimensional quantum systems, to simulate the time evolution of nonequilibrium stochastic systems. We describe this method in detail; a system's probability distribution is represented by a matrix product state (MPS) of finite dimension and then its time evolution is efficiently simulated by repeatedly updating and approximately refactorizing this representation. We examine the use of MPS as an approximation method, looking at parallels between the interpretations of applying it to quantum state vectors and probability distributions. In the context of stochastic systems we consider two types of factorization for use in the TEBD algorithm: non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which ensures that the approximate probability distribution is manifestly non-negative, and the singular value decomposition (SVD). Comparing these factorizations, we find the accuracy of the SVD to be substantially greater than current NMF algorithms. We then apply TEBD to simulate the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) for systems of up to hundreds of lattice sites in size. Using exact analytic results for the TASEP steady state, we find that TEBD reproduces this state such that the error in calculating expectation values can be made negligible even when severely compressing the description of the system by restricting the dimension of the MPS to be very small. Out of the steady state we show for specific observables that expectation values converge as the dimension of the MPS is increased to a moderate size.

DOI
10.1103/physreve.82.036702

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We adapt the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) algorithm, originally devised to simulate the dynamics of one-dimensional quantum systems, to simulate the time evolution of nonequilibrium stochastic systems. We describe this method in detail; a system's probability distribution is represented by a matrix product state (MPS) of finite dimension and then its time evolution is efficiently simulated by repeatedly updating and approximately refactorizing this representation. We examine the use of MPS as an approximation method, looking at parallels between the interpretations of applying it to quantum state vectors and probability distributions. In the context of stochastic systems we consider two types of factorization for use in the TEBD algorithm: non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), which ensures that the approximate probability distribution is manifestly non-negative, and the singular value decomposition (SVD). Comparing these factorizations, we find the accuracy of the SVD to be substantially greater than current NMF algorithms. We then apply TEBD to simulate the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process (TASEP) for systems of up to hundreds of lattice sites in size. Using exact analytic results for the TASEP steady state, we find that TEBD reproduces this state such that the error in calculating expectation values can be made negligible even when severely compressing the description of the system by restricting the dimension of the MPS to be very small. Out of the steady state we show for specific observables that expectation values converge as the dimension of the MPS is increased to a moderate size.
We introduce a simple yet significant improvement to the time-evolving block decimation (TEBD) tensor network algorithm for simulating the time dynamics of strongly correlated one-dimensional (1D) mixed quantum states. The efficiency of 1D tensor network methods stems from using a product of matrices to express either: the coefficients of a wavefunction, yielding a matrix product state (MPS); or the expectation values of a density matrix, yielding a matrix product density operator (MPDO). To avoid exponential computational costs, TEBD truncates the matrix dimension while simulating the time evolution. However, when truncating an MPDO, TEBD does not favor the likely more important low-weight expectation values, such as \langle c_i^\dagger c_j \rangle ⟨ c i † c j ⟩ , over the exponentially many high-weight expectation values, such as \langle c_{i_1}^\dagger c^\dagger_{i_2} \cdots c_{i_n} \rangle ⟨ c i 1 † c i 2 † ⋯ c i n ⟩ of weight n n , despite the critical importance of the low-weight expectation values. Motivated by this shortcoming, we propose a reweighted TEBD (rTEBD) algorithm that deprioritizes high-weight expectation values by a factor of \gamma^{-n} γ − n during the truncation. This modification makes rTEBD significantly more accurate than the TEBD time-dependent simulation of an MPDO, and competitive with and sometimes better than TEBD using MPS. Furthermore, by prioritizing low-weight expectation values, rTEBD preserves conserved quantities to high precision.
In this introductory review, we present and compare four algorithms for the numerical integration of the Lindblad equation for one-dimensional quantum lattice systems. All four methods are based on Matrix Product State representations and can be viewed as extensions of the Time-Evolving Block Decimation (TEBD) algorithm to open quantum systems. Two approaches directly integrate the vectorized Lindblad equation, one of them explicitly enforcing the positivity of the density matrix. The other two rely on stochastic unravelings of the Lindblad equation, namely the quantum trajectory and quantum state diffusion approaches. We discuss the principles, numerical implementation, accuracy, and computational efficiency of the different methods, and benchmark them against an exactly solvable free fermion model.
When the amount of entanglement in a quantum system is limited, the relevant dynamics of the system is restricted to a very small part of the state space. When restricted to this subspace the description of the system becomes efficient in the system size. A class of algorithms, exemplified by the time-evolving block-decimation (TEBD) algorithm, make use of this observation by selecting the relevant subspace through a decimation technique relying on the singular value decomposition (SVD). In these algorithms, the complexity of each time-evolution step is dominated by the SVD. Here we show that, by applying a randomized version of the SVD routine (RRSVD), the power law governing the computational complexity of TEBD is lowered by one degree, resulting in a considerable speed-up. We exemplify the potential gains in efficiency at the hand of some real world examples to which TEBD can be successfully applied and demonstrate that for those systems RRSVD delivers results as accurate as state-of-the-art deterministic SVD routines.
We propose and benchmark a modified time evolution block decimation (TEBD) algorithm that uses a truncation scheme based on the QR decomposition instead of the singular value decomposition (SVD). The modification reduces the scaling with the dimension of the physical Hilbert space d from d3 down to d2. Moreover, the QR decomposition has a lower computational complexity than the SVD and allows for highly efficient implementations on GPU hardware. In a benchmark simulation of a global quench in a quantum clock model, we observe a speedup of up to three orders of magnitude comparing QR and SVD based updates on an A100 GPU.
This thesis mainly concerned with traffic and transport problems. Traffic flow is understood as a many-body system in which moving particles have asymmetric interactions. The Totally Asymmetric Simple Exclusion Process (TASEP) is a non-equilibrium lattice model which has been used widely in traffic modelling. In fact, it is the paradigmatic model for most of transport processes. In this model, objects move forward in one direction along a line segment and they are not allowed to pass each other. Traffic jam and Protein synthesis are two interesting examples which can be studied using this model. For traffic jam model, the above rules apply to cars travelling on a one-way road. This model will provide us with information on how much traffic the road can carry, where to put traffic lights, how wide should be the road and where to put the intersections. For the other example, protein synthesis, the TASEP could model ribosome moving on mRNA strands to produce proteins. Understanding the mechanism of this process not only provides us information about the regulation and control of protein synthesis, but also may be helpful to find therapeutic applications, as ribosome is the target of many antibiotics. For such non-equilibrium systems, which have interactions with the environment, there are no general framework such as the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics for closed systems in equilibrium. This increases the importance of using numerical techniques. In the TASEP model, the road (in vehicular traffic model) or the mRNA strands (in Protein synthesis) is represented a lattice of sites which are either occupied by exactly one particle or are empty. The Matrix Product States (MPS) representation is a useful approach to describe the probability distribution of these stochastic systems. The main idea is to efficiently represent the probability distribution of the stochastic system by a tensor network ansatz, which truncating unimportant degrees of freedom, can be a solution to the problem of the exponential increase in parameters with the size of the system, and correspondingly, the high computational costs. We can formulate the stochastic process in terms of an evolution operator similar to the Hamiltonian for a quantum many-body system. We use the adapted version of the Time Evolving Block Decimation (TEBD) algorithm — which is used for simulation of one-dimensional quantum systems — to study the evolution of the system and extract useful properties of the model in the steady state, such as density profile, current, velocity, correlation functions, etc. Then, we introduce an approach for evaluating the behaviour of a tagged particle in a system with open boundary condition and compute the distance travelled by this particle, the number of particle entered to the system during an interval time and time-dependent correlation functions.
Numerical methods for obtaining exact dynamics of non-Markovian open quantum systems are mostly limited to either small systems or to short-time evolution only. Here, we propose a new algorithm for computing process tensors--matrix product operator (MPO) representations that capture the environment influence--which achieves greatly enhanced computational scalings with system size, while maintaining linear scaling with simulation length. We build on recent developments in the field which allow for long-time evolutions through process tensors which have a time-translational invariance. These can be built for general Gaussian environments and generic coupling operators with the system using infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD). We introduce a modified iTEBD algorithm using intermediate compression steps which bring down the computation time scaling with system size ddd from O(d8)\mathcal{O}(d^8)O(d8) to O(d4)\mathcal{O}(d^4)O(d4), as well as significantly lowering the required memory. To illustrate the power of this method, we apply it to the problem of dispersive qubit readout in circuit QED, which was previously out-of-reach numerically. The full treatment of the measurement resonator, which requires a large system space, combined with the long simulation times precipitated by the separation of timescales between the measurement drive and the environment dissipation, is now possible. The algorithm we introduce not only allows for capturing non-Markovian dynamics in large open quantum systems, but also further extends all the existing capabilities of process tensors, for example in quantum optimal control, or in computation of multi-time correlations or of steady states, to more complex systems with tens of levels.