arXiv:2003.01358 · Physical Review A
Calculating Rényi entropies with neural autoregressive quantum states
Zhaoyou Wang, Emily J. Davis
Abstract
Entanglement entropy is an essential metric for characterizing quantum many-body systems, but its numerical evaluation for neural network representations of quantum states has so far been inefficient and demonstrated only for the restricted Boltzmann machine architecture. Here we estimate generalized R\'enyi entropies of autoregressive neural quantum states with up to $N=256$ spins using quantum Monte Carlo methods. A naive ``direct sampling'' approach performs well for low-order R\'enyi entropies but fails for larger orders when benchmarked on a one-dimensional Heisenberg model. We therefore propose an improved ``conditional sampling'' method exploiting the autoregressive structure of the network ansatz, which outperforms direct sampling and facilitates calculations of higher-order R\'enyi entropies in both one- and two-dimensional Heisenberg models. Access to higher-order R\'enyi entropies allows for an approximation of the von Neumann entropy as well as extraction of the single-copy entanglement. Both methods elucidate the potential of neural network quantum states in quantum Monte Carlo studies of entanglement entropy for many-body systems.