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arXiv:2002.02363 · Physical review. B./Physical review. B

Topological quantum phase transitions retrieved through unsupervised machine learning

Yanming Che, Clemens Gneiting, Tao Liu, Franco Nori

Published Oct 29, 2020• 94 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

The discovery of topological features of quantum states plays an important role in modern condensed matter physics and various artificial systems. Due to the absence of local order parameters, the detection of topological quantum phase transitions remains a challenge. Machine learning may provide effective methods for identifying topological features. In this work we show that the unsupervised manifold learning can successfully retrieve topological quantum phase transitions in momentum and real space. Our results show that the Chebyshev distance between two data points sharpens the characteristic features of topological quantum phase transitions in momentum space, while the widely used Euclidean distance is in general suboptimal. Then a diffusion map or isometric map can be applied to implement the dimensionality reduction, and to learn about topological quantum phase transitions in an unsupervised manner. We demonstrate this method on the prototypical Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, the Qi-Wu-Zhang (QWZ) model, and the quenched SSH model in momentum space, and further provide implications and demonstrations for learning in real space, where the topological invariants could be unknown or hard to compute. The interpretable good performance of our approach shows the capability of manifold learning, when equipped with a suitable distance metric, in exploring topological quantum phase transitions.

DOI
10.1103/physrevb.102.134213

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The discovery of topological features of quantum states plays an important role in modern condensed matter physics and various artificial systems. Due to the absence of local order parameters, the detection of topological quantum phase transitions remains a challenge. Machine learning may provide effective methods for identifying topological features. In this work we show that the unsupervised manifold learning can successfully retrieve topological quantum phase transitions in momentum and real space. Our results show that the Chebyshev distance between two data points sharpens the characteristic features of topological quantum phase transitions in momentum space, while the widely used Euclidean distance is in general suboptimal. Then a diffusion map or isometric map can be applied to implement the dimensionality reduction, and to learn about topological quantum phase transitions in an unsupervised manner. We demonstrate this method on the prototypical Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, the Qi-Wu-Zhang (QWZ) model, and the quenched SSH model in momentum space, and further provide implications and demonstrations for learning in real space, where the topological invariants could be unknown or hard to compute. The interpretable good performance of our approach shows the capability of manifold learning, when equipped with a suitable distance metric, in exploring topological quantum phase transitions.
The discovery of topological features of quantum states plays a central role in modern condensed matter physics and various artificial systems. Due to the absence of local order parameters, the detection of topological phase transitions remains a challenge. Machine learning may provide effective methods for identifying topological features. In this work, we show that manifold learning can successfully retrieve topological quantum phase transitions in momentum space. Our results show that the Chebyshev distance (CD) between two data points can successfully capture the main features of topological phase transitions, while the widely used Euclidean distance in general fails. The similarity matrix built upon the CD thus naturally exhibits uncorrelated cluster structures, corresponding to distinct sectors in the topological phase diagram. Then a diffusion map is applied to implement dimensionality reduction and to learn about topological quantum phase transitions in an unsupervised manner. Our demonstrations on the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, the 2D Qi-Wu-Zhang (QWZ) model, and the quenched SSH model show the capability of generic unsupervised learning, when equipped with a suitable distance metric, in exploring topological quantum phase transitions.
Machine learning techniques have been shown to be effective to recognize different phases of matter and produce phase diagrams in the parameter space of interest, while they usually require prior labeled data to perform well. Here, we propose a machine learning procedure, mainly in an unsupervised manner, which can first identify topological/nontopological phases and then refine the locations of phase boundaries. By following this proposed procedure, we expand our previous work on the one-dimensional ppp-wave superconductor [Tsai et al., Phys. Rev. B 102, 054512 (2020)] and further on the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger model, with an emphasis on using the quantum-entanglement-based quantities as the input features. We find that our method not only reproduces similar results to the previous work with sharp phase boundaries but importantly it also does not rely on prior knowledge of the phase space, e.g., the number of phases present. We conclude with a few remarks about its potential, limitations, and explanatory power.
Experimental quantum simulators have become large and complex enough that discovering new physics from the huge amount of measurement data can be quite challenging, especially when little theoretical understanding of the simulated model is available. Unsupervised machine learning methods are particularly promising in overcoming this challenge. For the specific task of learning quantum phase transitions, unsupervised machine learning methods have primarily been developed for phase transitions characterized by simple order parameters, typically linear in the measured observables. However, such methods often fail for more complicated phase transitions, such as those involving incommensurate phases, valence-bond solids, topological order, and many-body localization. We show that the diffusion map method, which performs nonlinear dimensionality reduction and spectral clustering of the measurement data, has significant potential for learning such complex phase transitions unsupervised. This method may work for measurements of local observables in a single basis and is thus readily applicable to many experimental quantum simulators as a versatile tool for learning various quantum phases and phase transitions.
We develop a supervised machine learning algorithm that is able to learn topological phases of finite condensed-matter systems from bulk data in real lattice space. The algorithm employs diagonalization in real space together with any supervised learning algorithm to learn topological phases through an eigenvector ensembling procedure. We combine our algorithm with decision trees and random forests to successfully recover topological phase diagrams of Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) models from bulk lattice data in real space and show how the Shannon information entropy of ensembles of lattice eigenvectors can be used to retrieve a signal detailing how topological information is distributed in the bulk. We further use insights obtained from these information entropy signatures to engineer global topological features from real-space lattice data that still carry most of the topological information in the lattice, while greatly diminishing the size of feature space, thus effectively amounting to a topological lattice compression. Finally, we explore the theoretical possibility of interpreting the information entropy topological signatures in terms of emergent information entropy wave functions, which lead us to Heisenberg and Hirschman uncertainty relations for topological phase transitions. The discovery of Shannon information entropy signals associated with topological phase transitions from the analysis of data from several thousand SSH systems illustrates how model explainability in machine learning can advance the research of exotic quantum materials with properties that may power future technological applications such as qubit engineering for quantum computing.
The identification of topological phases in disordered systems is a significant field in condensed matter physics, where disorder breaks translational symmetry and invalidates conventional topological invariants defined in momentum space. Currently, machine learning offers promising alternatives in the identification of topological phases. In this work, by regarding the population dynamics as input data, we used feedforward neural networks (FNNs), vanilla recurrent neural networks (RNNs), and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to identify the topology in the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger (SSH) model and the disordered SSH model, respectively. We also compared the identification capabilities of different neural networks using different input data. Our results show that FNN has the lowest training cost and a relatively high prediction accuracy. However, when increasing the time length and reducing the number of time points, vanilla RNN has higher prediction accuracy. Furthermore, we develop an interactive web-based tool, enabling real-time topological phase prediction based on user-specified parameters. This study not only lays the foundation for researchers to identify topology by using population dynamics as the input data of neural networks but also provides an accessible platform to support data-driven exploration of complex quantum phases.
Topological phase transitions, which do not adhere to Landau's phenomenological model (i.e., a spontaneous symmetry breaking process and vanishing local order parameters), have been actively researched in condensed matter physics. Machine learning of topological phase transitions has generally proved difficult due to the global nature of the topological indices. Only recently has the method of diffusion maps been shown to be effective at identifying changes in topological order. However, previous diffusion map results required adjustments of two hyperparameters: a data length scale and the number of phase boundaries. In this article we introduce a heuristic that requires no such tuning. This heuristic allows computer programs to locate appropriate hyperparameters without user input. We demonstrate this method's efficacy by drawing remarkably accurate phase diagrams in three physical models: the Haldane model of graphene, a generalization of the Su-Schreiffer-Haeger model, and a model for a quantum ring with tunnel junctions. These diagrams are drawn, without human intervention, from a supplied range of model parameters.