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arXiv:2506.11222 · Physical Review Research

Many-body neural network wavefunction for a non-Hermitian Ising chain

Lavoisier Wah, Remmy A. M. Zen, Flore K. Kunst

Published Oct 31, 2025• 1 citation
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Non-Hermitian (NH) quantum systems have emerged as a powerful framework for describing open quantum systems, nonequilibrium dynamics, and engineered quantum optical materials. However, solving the ground-state properties of NH systems is challenging due to the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space and exotic phenomena such as the emergence of exceptional points. Another challenge arises from the limitations of traditional methods like exact diagonalization (ED). For the past decade, neural networks (NNs) have shown promise in approximating many-body wavefunctions, yet their application to NH systems remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we explore different NN architectures to investigate the ground-state properties of a parity-time-symmetric, one-dimensional NH, transverse field Ising model with a complex spectrum by employing a recurrent neural network (RNN), a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), and a multilayer perceptron (MLP). We construct the NN-based many-body wavefunctions and validate our approach by recovering the ground-state properties of the model for small system sizes, finding excellent agreement with ED. Furthermore, for larger system sizes, we demonstrate that the RNN outperforms both the RBM and MLP. However, we show that the accuracy of the RBM and MLP can be significantly improved through transfer learning, allowing them to perform comparably to the RNN for larger system sizes. These results highlight the potential of neural-network-based approaches—particularly for accurately capturing the low-energy physics of NH quantum systems in case of both weak and strong non-Hermiticity.

DOI
10.1103/q8p7-k7ms

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Non-Hermitian (NH) quantum systems have emerged as a powerful framework for describing open quantum systems, nonequilibrium dynamics, and engineered quantum optical materials. However, solving the ground-state properties of NH systems is challenging due to the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space and exotic phenomena such as the emergence of exceptional points. Another challenge arises from the limitations of traditional methods like exact diagonalization (ED). For the past decade, neural networks (NNs) have shown promise in approximating many-body wavefunctions, yet their application to NH systems remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we explore different NN architectures to investigate the ground-state properties of a parity-time-symmetric, one-dimensional NH, transverse field Ising model with a complex spectrum by employing a recurrent neural network (RNN), a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), and a multilayer perceptron (MLP). We construct the NN-based many-body wavefunctions and validate our approach by recovering the ground-state properties of the model for small system sizes, finding excellent agreement with ED. Furthermore, for larger system sizes, we demonstrate that the RNN outperforms both the RBM and MLP. However, we show that the accuracy of the RBM and MLP can be significantly improved through transfer learning, allowing them to perform comparably to the RNN for larger system sizes. These results highlight the potential of neural-network-based approaches—particularly for accurately capturing the low-energy physics of NH quantum systems in case of both weak and strong non-Hermiticity.
Non-Hermitian (NH) quantum many-body systems exhibit a rich array of physical phenomena, including NH skin effects and exceptional points, that remain largely inaccessible to existing numerical techniques. In this Letter, we investigate the application of variational Monte Carlo and neural network wave function representations to examine their ground-state properties. Due to the breakdown of the Rayleigh-Ritz variational principle in NH settings, we develop a self-consistent symmetric optimization framework based on variance minimization with a dynamically updated energy estimate. Our approach respects the biorthogonal structure of left and right eigenstates, and is further strengthened by exploiting system symmetries and pseudo-Hermiticity. Leveraging this tool, we probe and report accurate NH physical observables for a two-dimensional transverse-field Ising model with a complex longitudinal field, spanning both parity-time symmetric and broken phases. Lastly, we show, through extensive numerical evidence, that our method offers a scalable and flexible computational tool to investigate NH quantum many-body systems, beyond the reach of conventional numerical techniques such as the density-matrix renormalization group algorithm.
Neural Quantum States (NQS) are a class of variational wave functions parametrized by neural networks (NNs) to study quantum many-body systems. In this work, we propose \texttt{SineKAN}, a NQS \textit{ansatz} based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), to represent quantum mechanical wave functions as nested univariate functions. We show that \texttt{SineKAN} wavefunction with learnable sinusoidal activation functions can capture the ground state energies, fidelities and various correlation functions of the one dimensional Transverse-Field Ising model, Anisotropic Heisenberg model, and Antiferromagnetic J1−J2J_{1}-J_{2}J1​−J2​ model with different chain lengths. In our study of the J1−J2J_1-J_2J1​−J2​ model with L=100L=100L=100 sites, we find that the \texttt{SineKAN} model outperforms several previously explored neural quantum state \textit{ansätze}, including Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), Long Short-Term Memory models (LSTMs), and Multi-layer Perceptrons (MLP) \textit{a.k.a.} Feed Forward Neural Networks, when compared to the results obtained from the Density Matrix Renormalization Group (DMRG) algorithm. We find that \texttt{SineKAN} models can be trained to high precisions and accuracies with minimal computational costs.
We investigate the ground-state properties and quantum critical behavior of a non-Hermitian transverse-field Ising chain subjected to longitudinal and complex transverse magnetic fields. To address this interacting many-body problem, we employ real-valued neural quantum states based on Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), optimized using Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) sampling. Spectral analysis of finite chains reveals exceptional points associated with spontaneous parity-time (PT) symmetry breaking. A real-valued RBM framework is developed to reconstruct the ground-state eigenstates of the non-Hermitian Hamiltonian. Benchmark comparisons with exact diagonalization demonstrate that the RBM approach accurately reproduces the ground-state energy, magnetization, and spin-spin correlations. Extending the analysis to larger system sizes, we identify a non-Hermitian quantum phase transition characterized by PT-symmetry breaking and the emergence of magnetic order. Our results establish real-valued neural quantum states as an efficient and scalable framework for investigating critical phenomena in interacting non-Hermitian 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
The simulation of interacting many-body quantum systems is a central chal- lenge in condensed matter physics due to the exponential growth of the Hilbert space with system size. In this project, we implement a Neural Network Quantum State (NQS) ansatz based on a Complex Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) to solve for the ground state of the 1D Transverse Field Ising Model (TFIM). Using Variational Monte Carlo (VMC) optimization via Stochastic Reconfiguration (SR), we successfully train the network to approximate the ground state wave function across the paramagnetic-ferromagnetic phase transition. We benchmark our results against Exact Diagonalization (ED) for small systems (N = 12), demonstrating high accuracy in ground state energy estimation. Furthermore, we investigate quantum correlations and order parameters, specifically the transverse magnetization mx and longitudinal spin-spin correlations Czz(r), highlighting the RBM’s ability to capture long-range order and critical behavior near the quantum critical point hx/J = 1.
Over the past years, machine learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool to tackle complex problems over a broad range of scientific disciplines. In particular, artificial neural networks have been successfully deployed to mitigate the exponential complexity often encountered in quantum many-body physics, the study of properties of quantum systems built out of a large number of interacting particles. In this Article, we overview some applications of machine learning in condensed matter physics and quantum information, with particular emphasis on hands-on tutorials serving as a quick-start for a newcomer to the field. We present supervised machine learning with convolutional neural networks to learn a phase transition, unsupervised learning with restricted Boltzmann machines to perform quantum tomography, and variational Monte Carlo with recurrent neural-networks for approximating the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian. We briefly review the key ingredients of each algorithm and their corresponding neural-network implementation, and show numerical experiments for a system of interacting Rydberg atoms in two dimensions.