Quantum field theory (QFT) describes nature using continuous fields, but physical properties of QFT are usually revealed in terms of measurements of observables at a finite resolution. We describe a multiscale representation of free scalar bosonic and Ising model fermionic QFTs using wavelets. Making use of the orthogonality and self-similarity of the wavelet basis functions, we demonstrate some well-known relations such as scale-dependent subsystem entanglement entropy and renormalization of correlations in the ground state. We also find some new applications of the wavelet transform as a compressed representation of ground states of QFTs which can be used to illustrate quantum phase transitions via fidelity overlap and holographic entanglement of purification.
Quantum field theory (QFT) describes nature using continuous fields, but physical properties of QFT are usually revealed in terms of measurements of observables at a finite resolution. We describe a multiscale representation of free scalar bosonic and Ising model fermionic QFTs using wavelets. Making use of the orthogonality and self-similarity of the wavelet basis functions, we demonstrate some well-known relations such as scale-dependent subsystem entanglement entropy and renormalization of correlations in the ground state. We also find some new applications of the wavelet transform as a compressed representation of ground states of QFTs which can be used to illustrate quantum phase transitions via fidelity overlap and holographic entanglement of purification.
Wavelets encode data at multiple resolutions, which in a wavelet description of a quantum field theory, allows for fields to carry, in addition to space-time coordinates, an extra dimension: scale. A recently introduced Exact Holographic Mapping [C.H. Lee and X.-L. Qi, Phys. Rev. B 93, 035112 (2016)] uses the Haar wavelet basis to represent the free Dirac fermionic quantum field theory (QFT) at multiple renormalization scales thereby inducing an emergent bulk geometry in one higher dimension. This construction is, in fact, generic and we show how higher families of Daubechies wavelet transforms of 1+1 dimensional scalar bosonic QFT generate a bulk description with a variable rate of renormalization flow. In the massless case, where the boundary is described by conformal field theory, the bulk correlations decay with distance consistent with an Anti-de-Sitter space (AdS3) metric whose radius of curvature depends on the wavelet family used. We propose an experimental demonstration of the bulk/boundary correspondence via a digital quantum simulation using Gaussian operations on a set of quantum harmonic oscillator modes.
A successful approach to understand field theories is to resolve the physics into different length or energy scales using the renormalization group framework. We propose a quantum simulation of quantum field theory which encodes field degrees of freedom in a wavelet basis---a multiscale description of the theory. Since wavelet families can be constructed to have compact support at all resolutions, this encoding allows for quantum simulations to create particle excitations which are local at some chosen scale and provides a natural way to associate observables in the theory to finite-resolution detectors.
We propose an adaptation of Entanglement Renormalization for quantum field theories that, through the use of discrete wavelet transforms, strongly parallels the tensor network architecture of the \emph{Multiscale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz} (a.k.a. MERA). Our approach, called wMERA, has several advantages of over previous attempts to adapt MERA to continuum systems. In particular, (i) wMERA is formulated directly in position space, hence preserving the quasi-locality and sparsity of entanglers; and (ii) it enables a built-in RG flow in the implementation of real-time evolution and in computations of correlation functions, which is key for efficient numerical implementations. As examples, we describe in detail two concrete implementations of our wMERA algorithm for free scalar and fermionic theories in (1+1) spacetime dimensions. Possible avenues for constructing wMERAs for interacting field theories are also discussed.
A bstract We propose an adaptation of Entanglement Renormalization for quantum field theories that, through the use of discrete wavelet transforms, strongly parallels the tensor network architecture of the Multiscale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (a.k.a. MERA). Our approach, called wMERA, has several advantages of over previous attempts to adapt MERA to continuum systems. In particular, (i) wMERA is formulated directly in position space, hence preserving the quasi-locality and sparsity of entanglers; and (ii) it enables a built-in RG flow in the implementation of real-time evolution and in computations of correlation functions, which is key for efficient numerical implementations. As examples, we describe in detail two concrete implementations of our wMERA algorithm for free scalar and fermionic theories in (1+1) spacetime dimensions. Possible avenues for constructing wMERAs for interacting field theories are also discussed.
We establish a precise connection between discrete wavelet transforms and entanglement renormalization, a real-space renormalization group transformation for quantum systems on the lattice, in the context of free particle systems. Specifically, we employ Daubechies wavelets to build approximations to the ground state of the critical Ising model, then demonstrate that these states correspond to instances of the multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz (MERA), producing the first known analytic MERA for critical systems.
We propose an effective Hamiltonian formulation of quantum field theories using a Daubechies wavelet basis in position space. Combined with flow-equation methods of the similarity renormalization group (SRG), this approach provides an efficient framework for analyzing quantum field theories by reducing the dimensionality of the Hamiltonian and systematically decoupling degrees of freedom across scales. As an application, the free scalar field theory has been reformulated within this framework to calculate the low-lying energy spectrum of the theory. These basis elements are known to transform the free scalar field theory into a theory of coupled localized oscillators, each of which is labeled by a location and a resolution index. In this representation, the Hamiltonian is naturally organized into fixed-resolution blocks, alongside blocks associated with the interactions between different resolutions. To decouple the different resolution modes and obtain a block diagonalized Hamiltonian with each block associated with a fixed resolution, the flow equation approach of SRG is applied. Finally, we demonstrate that with increasing resolution, the low-energy spectrum can be extracted from the effective lowest-resolution block of the Hamiltonian, leading to a significant reduction in computational cost.