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arXiv:1611.03779 · Physical Review Letters

Continuous Matrix Product States for Quantum Fields: An Energy Minimization Algorithm

Martin Ganahl, Julián Rincón, Guifré Vidal

Published Jun 2, 2017• 53 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The generalization of matrix product states (MPS) to continuous systems, as proposed in the breakthrough Letter of Verstraete and Cirac [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 190405 (2010).PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.104.190405], provides a powerful variational ansatz for the ground state of strongly interacting quantum field theories in one spatial dimension. A continuous MPS (cMPS) approximation to the ground state can be obtained by simulating a Euclidean time evolution. In this Letter we propose a cMPS optimization algorithm based instead on energy minimization by gradient methods and demonstrate its performance by applying it to the Lieb-Liniger model (an integrable model of an interacting bosonic field) directly in the thermodynamic limit. We observe a very significant computational speed-up, of more than 2 orders of magnitude, with respect to simulating a Euclidean time evolution. As a result, a much larger cMPS bond dimension D can be reached (e.g., D=256 with moderate computational resources), thus helping unlock the full potential of the cMPS representation for ground state studies.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.118.220402

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The generalization of matrix product states (MPS) to continuous systems, as proposed in the breakthrough Letter of Verstraete and Cirac [Phys. Rev. Lett. 104, 190405 (2010).PRLTAO0031-900710.1103/PhysRevLett.104.190405], provides a powerful variational ansatz for the ground state of strongly interacting quantum field theories in one spatial dimension. A continuous MPS (cMPS) approximation to the ground state can be obtained by simulating a Euclidean time evolution. In this Letter we propose a cMPS optimization algorithm based instead on energy minimization by gradient methods and demonstrate its performance by applying it to the Lieb-Liniger model (an integrable model of an interacting bosonic field) directly in the thermodynamic limit. We observe a very significant computational speed-up, of more than 2 orders of magnitude, with respect to simulating a Euclidean time evolution. As a result, a much larger cMPS bond dimension D can be reached (e.g., D=256 with moderate computational resources), thus helping unlock the full potential of the cMPS representation for ground state studies.
Continuous Matrix Product States (cMPS) are powerful variational ansatz states for ground states of continuous quantum field theories in (1+1) dimension. In this paper we introduce a novel parametrization of the cMPS wave function based on basis-spline functions, which we coin spline-based MPS (spMPS), and develop novel regauging techniques for inhomogeneous cMPS. We extend a recently developed ground-state optimization algorithm for translational invariant cMPS [M. Ganahl, J. Rincón, G.Vidal. Phys.Rev.Lett. 118,220402 (2017)] to the case of inhomogeneous cMPS and, as proof-of-principle, use it to obtain the ground-state of a gas of Lieb-Liniger bosons in a periodic potential. The proposed method provides a first working implementation of a cMPS optimization for non-translational invariant continuous Hamiltonians.
Just as matrix product states represent ground states of one-dimensional quantum spin systems faithfully, continuous matrix product states (cMPS) provide faithful representations of the vacuum of interacting field theories in one spatial dimension. Unlike the quantum spin case, however, for which the density matrix renormalization group and related matrix product state algorithms provide robust algorithms for optimizing the variational states, the optimization of cMPS for systems with inhomogeneous external potentials has been problematic. We resolve this problem by constructing a piecewise linear parameterization of the underlying matrix-valued functions, which enables the calculation of the exact reduced density matrices everywhere in the system by high-order Taylor expansions. This turns the variational cMPS problem into a variational algorithm from which both the energy and its backwards derivative can be calculated exactly and at a cost that scales as the cube of the bond dimension. We illustrate this by finding ground states of interacting bosons in external potentials and by calculating boundary or Casimir energy corrections of continuous many-body systems with open boundary conditions.
By combining the continuous matrix product state (cMPS) representation for quantum fields in the continuum with standard optimization techniques for matrix product states (MPS) on the lattice, we obtain an approximation $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$, directly in the continuum, of the ground state of nonrelativistic quantum field theories. This construction works both for translation-invariant systems and in the more challenging context of inhomogeneous systems, as we demonstrate for an interacting bosonic field in a periodic potential. Given the continuum Hamiltonian HHH, we consider a sequence of discretized Hamiltonians ${{H({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}})}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}=1,2,\ensuremath{\cdots},p}$ on increasingly finer lattices with lattice spacing ${\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{1}>{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{2}>\ensuremath{\cdots}>{\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{p}$. We first use energy minimization to optimize an MPS approximation $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{1})\ensuremath{\rangle}$ for the ground state of $H({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{1})$. Given the MPS $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}})\ensuremath{\rangle}$ optimized for the ground state of $H({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}})$, we use it to initialize the energy minimization for Hamiltonian $H({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}+1})$, resulting in the optimized MPS $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{\ensuremath{\alpha}+1})\ensuremath{\rangle}$. By iteration we produce an optimized MPS $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{p})\ensuremath{\rangle}$ for the ground state of $H({\ensuremath{\epsilon}}_{p})$, from which we finally extract the cMPS approximation $|\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Psi}}\ensuremath{\rangle}$ for the ground state of HHH. Two key ingredients of our proposal are as follows: (i) a procedure to discretize HHH into a lattice model where each site contains a two-dimensional vector space (spanned by vacuum $|0\ensuremath{\rangle}$ and one boson $|1\ensuremath{\rangle}$ states), and (ii) a procedure to map MPS representations from a coarser lattice to a finer lattice.
The continuous matrix product state (cMPS) ansatz is a promising numerical tool for studying quantum many-body systems in continuous space. Although it provides a clean framework that allows one to directly simulate continuous systems, the optimization of cMPS is known to be a very challenging task, especially in the case of multi-component systems. In this work, we have developed an improved optimization scheme for multi-component cMPS that enables simulations of bosonic quantum mixtures with substantially larger bond dimensions than previous works. We benchmark our method on the two-component Lieb-Liniger model, obtaining numerical results that agree well with analytical predictions. Our work paves the way for further numerical studies of quantum mixture systems using the cMPS ansatz.
We present a way of constructing continuous matrix product states (cMPS) for coupled fields. The cMPS is a variational ansatz for the ground state of quantum field theories in one dimension. Our proposed scheme is based on a physical interpretation in which the cMPS class can be produced by means of a dissipative dynamic of a system interacting with a bath. We study the case of coupled bosonic fields. We test the method with previous DMRG results in coupled Lieb-Liniger models. Besides, we discuss a novel application for characterizing the Luttinger liquid theory emerging in the low-energy regime of these theories. Finally, we propose a circuit QED architecture as a quantum simulator for coupled fields.
I introduce a modification of continuous matrix product states (CMPS) that makes them adapted to relativistic quantum field theories (QFT). These relativistic CMPS can be used to solve genuine (1+11+11+1)-dimensional QFT without UV cutoff and directly in the thermodynamic limit. The main idea is to work directly in the basis that diagonalizes the free part of the model considered, which allows one to fit its short distance behavior exactly. This makes computations slightly less trivial than with standard CMPS. However, they remain feasible, and I present all the steps needed for the optimization. The asymptotic cost as a function of the bond dimension remains the same as for standard CMPS. I illustrate the method on the self-interacting scalar field, also known as the ${\ensuremath{\phi}}_{2}^{4}$ model. Aside from providing unequaled precision in the continuum, the numerical results obtained are truly variational, and thus provide rigorous energy upper bounds.