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arXiv:1809.01944 · Journal of the Physical Society of Japan

On the Question of Ergodicity in Quantum Spin Glass Phase and Its Role in Quantum Annealing

Sudip Mukherjee, Bikas K Chakrabarti

Published Mar 1, 2019• 9 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

We first review, following our earlier studies, the critical behavior of the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model at finite as well as at zero temperatures. Through the analysis of the Binder cumulant we determined the entire phase diagram of the model and from the scaling analysis of the numerical data we obtained the correlation length exponent. For both the critical Binder cumulant and the correlation length exponent, we observed a crossover from classical- to quantum-fluctuation-dominated values at a finite temperature. We studied the behavior of the order parameter distribution of the model in the glass phase (at finite and zero temperatures). Along with a classical-fluctuation-dominated nonergodic region (where the replica symmetry is broken), we also found a quantum-fluctuation-dominated low-temperature ergodic region in the spin glass phase. In this quantum-fluctuation-dominated region, the order parameter distribution has a narrow peak around its most probable value, eventually becoming a delta function in the infinite-system-size limit (indicating replica symmetry restoration or ergodicity in the system). We also found that the annealing time (to reach a very low energy level of the classical SK model) becomes practically system-size-independent when the annealing paths pass through this ergodic region. In contrast, when such paths pass through the nonergodic region, the convergence time grows rapidly with the system size. We present a new study of the autocorrelation of the spins in both ergodic and nonergodic regions. We found a significant increase in the relaxation time (and also a change in the relaxation behavior) in the classical-fluctuation-dominated (nonergodic) region compared with that in the quantum-fluctuation-dominated (ergodic) region of the spin glass phase.

DOI
10.7566/jpsj.88.061004

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We first review, following our earlier studies, the critical behavior of the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model at finite as well as at zero temperatures. Through the analysis of the Binder cumulant we determined the entire phase diagram of the model and from the scaling analysis of the numerical data we obtained the correlation length exponent. For both the critical Binder cumulant and the correlation length exponent, we observed a crossover from classical- to quantum-fluctuation-dominated values at a finite temperature. We studied the behavior of the order parameter distribution of the model in the glass phase (at finite and zero temperatures). Along with a classical-fluctuation-dominated nonergodic region (where the replica symmetry is broken), we also found a quantum-fluctuation-dominated low-temperature ergodic region in the spin glass phase. In this quantum-fluctuation-dominated region, the order parameter distribution has a narrow peak around its most probable value, eventually becoming a delta function in the infinite-system-size limit (indicating replica symmetry restoration or ergodicity in the system). We also found that the annealing time (to reach a very low energy level of the classical SK model) becomes practically system-size-independent when the annealing paths pass through this ergodic region. In contrast, when such paths pass through the nonergodic region, the convergence time grows rapidly with the system size. We present a new study of the autocorrelation of the spins in both ergodic and nonergodic regions. We found a significant increase in the relaxation time (and also a change in the relaxation behavior) in the classical-fluctuation-dominated (nonergodic) region compared with that in the quantum-fluctuation-dominated (ergodic) region of the spin glass phase.
We review our earlier studies on the order parameter distribution of the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model. Through Monte Carlo technique, we investigate the behavior of the order parameter distribution at finite temperatures. The zero temperature study of the spin glass order parameter distribution is made by the exact diagonalization method. We find in low-temperature (high-transverse-field) spin glass region, the tail (extended up to zero value of order parameter) and width of the order parameter distribution become zero in thermodynamic limit. Such observations clearly suggest the existence of a low-temperature (high-transverse-field) ergodic region. We also find in high-temperature (low-transverse-field) spin glass phase the order parameter distribution has nonzero value for all values of the order parameter even in infinite system size limit, which essentially indicates the nonergodic behavior of the system. We study the annealing dynamics by the paths which pass through both ergodic and nonergodic spin glass regions. We find the average annealing time becomes system size independent for the paths which pass through the quantum-fluctuation-dominated ergodic spin glass region. In contrast to that, the annealing time becomes strongly system size dependent for annealing down through the classical-fluctuation-dominated nonergodic spin glass region. We investigate the behavior of the spin autocorrelation in the spin glass phase. We observe that the decay rate of autocorrelation towards its equilibrium value is much faster in the ergodic region with respect to the nonergodic region of the spin glass phase.
We review the numerical studies on the critical behaviour of the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) spin glass model, which indicate that a quantum critical behaviour is observed up to a low but non-zero value of temperature. We revisit the numerical investigations on the spin glass order parameter distributions, which identify a low temperature along with high transverse field spin glass phase where the order parameter distribution becomes a delta function in the thermodynamic limit indicating the restoration of replica symmetry and ergodic nature of the system. In the remaining spin glass phase associated with high temperature and low transverse field, the observed distribution is broad akin to the Parisi order parameter distribution. This essentially indicates the non-ergodic behaviour of the system. We further discuss the annealing dynamics studies on the quantum SK model. Such investigations reveal the system size independence of annealing time when the annealing paths go through the ergodic spin glass region. Interestingly, when such dynamics are performed in the non-ergodic spin glass phase the annealing time becomes an increasing function of the system size. Spin autocorrelation shows faster relaxation in the ergodic spin glass region compared with that found in the non-ergodic spin glass region. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum annealing and computation: challenges and perspectives'.
We explore the behavior of the order parameter distribution of the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model in the spin glass phase using Monte Carlo technique for the effective Suzuki-Trotter Hamiltonian at finite temperatures and that at zero temperature obtained using the exact diagonalization method. Our numerical results indicate the existence of a low- but finite-temperature quantum-fluctuation-dominated ergodic region along with the classical fluctuation-dominated high-temperature nonergodic region in the spin glass phase of the model. In the ergodic region, the order parameter distribution gets narrower around the most probable value of the order parameter as the system size increases. In the other region, the Parisi order distribution function has nonvanishing value everywhere in the thermodynamic limit, indicating nonergodicity. We also show that the average annealing time for convergence (to a low-energy level of the model, within a small error range) becomes system size independent for annealing down through the (quantum-fluctuation-dominated) ergodic region. It becomes strongly system size dependent for annealing through the nonergodic region. Possible finite-size scaling-type behavior for the extent of the ergodic region is also addressed.
We study the critical behavior of the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model in transverse field (at finite temperature) using Monte Carlo simulation and exact diagonalization (at zero temperature). We determine the phase diagram of the model by estimating the Binder cumulant. We also determine the correlation length exponent from the collapse of the scaled data. Our numerical studies here indicate that critical Binder cumulant (indicating the universality class of the transition behavior) and the correlation length exponent cross over from their "classical" to "quantum" values at a finite temperature (unlike the cases of pure systems, where such crossovers occur at zero temperature). We propose a qualitative argument supporting such an observation, employing a simple tunneling picture.
The performance of quantum annealing for combinatorial optimization is fundamentally limited by the minimum energy gap ΔΔΔ encountered at quantum phase transitions. We investigate the scaling of ΔΔΔ with system size NNN for two paradigmatic quantum spin-glass models: the two-dimensional Edwards-Anderson (2D-EA) and the all-to-all Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) models. Utilizing a newly proposed unbiased energy-gap estimator for continuous-time projection quantum Monte Carlo simulations, complemented by high-performance sparse eigenvalue solvers, we characterize the gap distributions across disorder realizations. It is found that, in the 2D-EA case, the inverse-gap distribution develops a fat tail with infinite variance as NNN increases. This indicates that the unfavorable super-algebraic scaling of ΔΔΔ, recently reported for binary couplings [Nature 631, 749 (2024)], persists for the Gaussian disorder considered here, pointing to a universal feature of 2D spin glasses. Conversely, the SK model retains a finite-variance distribution, with the disorder-averaged gap following a rather slow power law, close to Δ∝N−1/3Δ\propto N^{-1/3}Δ∝N−1/3. This finding provides a promising outlook for the potential efficiency of quantum annealers for optimization problems with dense connectivity.
I study in detail the quantum Sherrington-Kirkpatrick (SK) model, i.e., the infinite-range Ising spin glass in a transverse field, by solving numerically the effective one-dimensional model that the quantum SK model can be mapped to in the thermodynamic limit. I find that the replica symmetric solution is unstable down to zero temperature, in contrast to some previous claims, and so there is not only a line of transitions in the (longitudinal) field-temperature plane (the de Almeida-Thouless, AT, line) where replica symmetry is broken, but also a quantum de Almeida-Thouless (QuAT) line in the transverse field-longitudinal field plane at T=0. If the QuAT line also occurs in models with short-range interactions its presence might affect the performance of quantum annealers when solving spin glass-type problems with a bias (i.e., magnetic field).