We investigate the applicability of machine learning techniques in studying the finite-size effects associated with many-body physics. These techniques have an emerging presence in many-body theory as they have been used for interpolations, extrapolations, and in modeling wave functions. We will resolve several issues associated with machine learning and many-body calculations such as small datasets, outliers, and discontinuities, for the purpose of extrapolating finite calculations to macroscopic scales. We carry out a systematic investigation of two related systems by developing metrics that aim to avoid spurious effects and capture desired features. This work uses neural networks to extrapolate the unitary gas to the thermodynamic limit at zero range, which is otherwise difficult to reach. The effective mass of strongly interacting neutron matter is also studied and makes use of the noninteracting problem to resolve discontinuous predictions. For this investigation, we also carried out new auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) calculations for a variety of densities and particle numbers. Ultimately, we demonstrate an effective utility for neural networks in this context.
We investigate the applicability of machine learning techniques in studying the finite-size effects associated with many-body physics. These techniques have an emerging presence in many-body theory as they have been used for interpolations, extrapolations, and in modeling wave functions. We will resolve several issues associated with machine learning and many-body calculations such as small datasets, outliers, and discontinuities, for the purpose of extrapolating finite calculations to macroscopic scales. We carry out a systematic investigation of two related systems by developing metrics that aim to avoid spurious effects and capture desired features. This work uses neural networks to extrapolate the unitary gas to the thermodynamic limit at zero range, which is otherwise difficult to reach. The effective mass of strongly interacting neutron matter is also studied and makes use of the noninteracting problem to resolve discontinuous predictions. For this investigation, we also carried out new auxiliary field diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) calculations for a variety of densities and particle numbers. Ultimately, we demonstrate an effective utility for neural networks in this context.
We investigate the applicability of machine-learning techniques in studying the finite-size effects associated with many-body physics. These techniques have an emerging presence in many-body theory as they have been used for interpolations, extrapolations, and in modeling wavefunctions. We carry out a systematic investigation of two related systems by developing metrics that aim to avoid spurious effects and capture desired features. This work uses neural networks to extrapolate the Unitary Gas to the thermodynamic limit at zero-range, which is otherwise difficult to reach. The effective mass of strongly interacting neutron matter is also studied and makes use of the non-interacting problem to resolve discontinuous predictions. For this investigation, we also carried out new Auxiliary Field Diffusion Monte Carlo (AFDMC) calculations for a variety of densities and particle numbers. Ultimately, we demonstrate an effective utility for neural networks in this context.
This thesis contains two topics related to strongly interacting neutron matter. The first considers the effective mass, described in Landau Fermi liquid theory, which aims to capture many-body physics in terms of a single parameter. Monte Carlo algorithms were used to determine energies for finite particle simulations. Studying the deviations from the thermodynamic limit for the non-interacting gas allows for claims about the macroscopic scale. Following this systematic investigation, the density dependence was determined to be less than one for the considered densities. The second topic focuses on machine learning algorithms which have proliferated into many fields, with an emerging popularity in nuclear physics. These algorithms work by learning patterns found in datasets to develop their predictive power. After identifying and resolving issues introduced by a small dataset, they were used to extrapolate finite calculations to zero effective-range in the thermodynamic limit, which best approximates neutron matter.
One of the most intriguing areas of physics is the study of strongly correlated many-body systems. In these kinds of systems, a large number of particles interacts via interactions that are strong enough to play a major role in determining the properties of the system, which is particularly interesting when multiple interaction terms compete and cannot be satisfied simultaneously. Examples of phases they realize range from simple magnetism to puzzling phenomena such as superconductivity or topological order. Of special interest in condensed matter are fermionic models which have an extra layer of complexity added by the possibly intricate sign structure of the wave function. \nHowever, exactly solvable models that exhibit the sought-after phenomena are scarce and Hamiltonians that are supposed to model experiments often elude analytical solutions precisely due to the strong interactions. Numerical methods are thus essential to gain insight into these systems and provide an important link between theoretical models and real world experiments. There are many different methods that in principle allow solving a problem numerically exact, most prominently exact diagonalization, tensor network based methods such as DMRG and (quantum) Monte Carlo. Exact diagonalization is certainly the most straightforward technique which allows measuring any observable of interest but its application to interacting models is severely limited by the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with the system size which only allows studying rather small systems. Tensor network methods excel in the study of gapped, one-dimensional systems and while they have shown some impressive results for two-dimensional systems, they need a lot of fine tuning and careful analysis to be considered reliable in this very important domain. Quantum Monte Carlo, on the other hand, is in principle neither limited by the size of the Hilbert space nor by the strength of the interactions and has thus been a tremendously important tool for studying condensed matter systems which is why it is the focus of this thesis. \nIt is necessary to continuously advance existing and develop new techniques to keep up with theoretical as well as with experimental progress. In this thesis, new methods to identify and characterize conventional and novel phases of matter within quantum Monte Carlo are developed and tested on archetypical models of condensed matter. \nIn the first part of this thesis, a method to study entanglement properties of strongly interacting fermionic models in quantum Monte Carlo is presented. Measurements of this kind are needed because some characteristics of a system remain hidden from conventional approaches based on the calculation of correlation functions. Prime examples are systems that realize so-called topological order entailing long-range entanglement that can be positively diagnosed using entanglement techniques. Realizing such measurements in a concrete algorithm is not straightforward for fermions. A large section of this part is thus devoted to developing a solution to the problem of implementing entanglement measurements and benchmarking the results against known data. \nThe second part is concerned with a truly novel and recent approach to the many-body problem, namely the symbiosis of machine learning and quantum Monte Carlo techniques. Out of the many different possibilities to combine the two, this part is concerne with exploring ways in which machine learning can help to effortlessly explore phase diagrams of hitherto unknown Hamiltonians. \nDespite the power and versatility of quantum Monte Carlo techniques, it does suffer from one significant weakness called the fermion sign problem. At its core related to the peculiar exchange statistics of fermions, it is in principle merely a technical problem of the Monte Carlo procedure but one that actually prohibits the use of Monte Carlo methods for a large number of interesting problems. The sign problem has been known for a long time but remains unsolved to this day. Thus, it is time to approach the problem from a different perspective with the hope of learning something new that can either help to better understand the problem itself or the properties of the models affected by it. Both of the two major research areas, entanglement measures and machine learning, are capable of providing such new perspectives and the sign problem will be revisited in more detail in the context of each of them.
A long-standing goal of nuclear theory is to explain how the structure and dynamics of atomic nuclei and neutron-star matter emerge from the underlying interactions among protons and neutrons. Achieving this goal requires solving the nuclear quantum many-body problem with high accuracy across a wide range of length scales and density regimes. In this review, we discuss how artificial neural network representations of the nuclear many-body wave function have significantly extended the capabilities of continuum quantum Monte Carlo methods. In particular, neural network quantum states enable calculations of larger systems than were previously accessible and provide a flexible framework for capturing phenomena that challenge conventional approaches, including the emergence of nuclear clusters and superfluid phases in dense matter. We highlight recent applications to finite nuclei, infinite nuclear and neutron matter, and dynamical processes relevant to lepton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus scattering. We also discuss conceptual and methodological connections with condensed matter physics, emphasizing developments in neural network quantum states that bridge strongly correlated systems across disciplines. Together, these developments demonstrate how neural-network methods open new avenues toward unified and accurate descriptions of nuclear structure, matter, and reactions.
Most interacting many-body systems in physics are not analytically solvable. Instead, numerical methods are needed for the study of these complex and high-dimensional problems. At present, there are many interesting problems in strongly correlated systems that remain unsolved with current methods. At the heart of this problem is finding an efficient representation that incorporates symmetries, correlations and general features. \n \nIn the context of computer science, machine learning techniques have had astonishing success at reducing the dimensionality of data. The leading method is through the use of artificial neural networks. These networks have been enormously successful at sifting through vast amounts of data to find patterns and regularities. In a sense, neural networks are themselves a statistical system whose properties are adjusted to mimic the features of the data. By finding an effective low-dimensional representation of the data, machine learning has greatly subdued the curse of dimensionality found in many real-world problems. \n \nIn this Thesis, we apply several machine learning techniques to the study of interacting many-body systems in classical and quantum statistical physics. We explore supervised classification of phases of matter with an emphasis on physical interpretation of the net- work. In doing so, we design a custom network architecture that possesses rotational symmetry as an inductive bias. We further investigate connections between the renormalization group and deep learning through applying a super-resolving neural network to the classical Ising model. Towards experimental efforts, we also repurpose generative machine learning to quantum state tomography for the calibration and testing of quantum devices. We conclude with a latent variable model inspired by near-term quantum algorithms. This maps to a variational Monte Carlo ansatz that produces samples efficiently for interacting quantum systems.
Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body systems requires dealing with a largeconfiguration space comprised of a set of all possible measurable configurations. The total number of configurations grows exponentially with the size of the system, which makes exact numerical calculations impossible for even moderately sized systems. Since the advent of high-temperature superconductivity and the subsequent interest in strongly correlated phases of matter, progress in the field has been marked by ingenuity of the field to overcome these computational limitations. The first techniques to emerge were inspired by quantum chemistry and based on exact diagonalization[1], which is limited to small clusters, and different variants of quantum Monte Carlo[2], that suffers from the sign problem in fermionic and frustrated systems. Circa 1992, the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] became one of the major breakthroughs of the past few decades. Despite the success of DMRG for one-dimensional(1D) and quasi-one-dimensional geometries, extensions to actual two-dimensional systems remain challenging and applications are constrained to long cylinders and strips. One promising alternative is to combine one the oldest methods, variational wave functions (VWFs), with neural networks, which have been used to recently with great success in machine learning. The focus of this dissertation is on developing novel variational Monte Carlo algorithms to make neural network variational wave functions applicable to many problems in quantum many-body physics. These algorithms draw from existing variational wave-function, tensor network, and machine learning methods. We calculate dynamical spectral functions using the vector correction and Chebyshev expansion method. We do finite temperature calculations with minimally entangled thermal states. Finally, we do ground state calculations for the frustrated J1−J2 Heisenberg model. We benchmark these results using restricted Boltzmann machines as the neural network for the the variational wave-functions.--Author's abstract