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arXiv:2602.02665

Approaching the Thermodynamic Limit with Neural-Network Quantum States

Luciano Loris Viteritti, Riccardo Rende, Subir Sachdev, Giuseppe Carleo

cond-mat.str-elcond-mat.dis-nnquant-phSubmitted Feb 2, 2026• Announced Feb 4, 2026• 0 citations
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Abstract

Accessing the thermodynamic-limit properties of strongly correlated quantum matter requires simulations on very large lattices, a regime that remains challenging for numerical methods, especially in frustrated two-dimensional systems. We introduce the Spatial Attention mechanism, a minimal and physically interpretable inductive bias for Neural-Network Quantum States, implemented as a single learned length scale within the Transformer architecture. This bias stabilizes large-scale optimization and enables access to thermodynamic-limit physics through highly accurate simulations on unprecedented system sizes within the Variational Monte Carlo framework. Applied to the spin-$\tfrac12$ triangular-lattice Heisenberg antiferromagnet, our approach achieves state-of-the-art results on clusters of up to $42\times42$ sites. The ability to simulate such large systems allows controlled finite-size scaling of energies and order parameters, enabling the extraction of experimentally relevant quantities such as spin-wave velocities and uniform susceptibilities. In turn, we find extrapolated thermodynamic limit energies systematically better than those obtained with tensor-network approaches such as iPEPS. The resulting magnetization is strongly renormalized, $M_0=0.148(1)$ (about $30\%$ of the classical value), revealing that less accurate variational states systematically overestimate magnetic order. Analysis of the optimized wave function further suggests an intrinsically non-local sign structure, indicating that the sign problem cannot be removed by local basis transformations. We finally demonstrate the generality of the method by obtaining state-of-the-art energies for a $J_1$-$J_2$ Heisenberg model on a $20\times20$ square lattice, outperforming Residual Convolutional Neural Networks.

Comments
10 pages, 8 figures, 2 tables

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Machine-learning-based variational Monte Carlo simulations are a promising approach for targeting quantum many-body ground states, especially in two dimensions and in cases where the ground state is known to have a nontrivial sign structure. While many state-of-the-art variational energies have been reached with these methods for finite-size systems, little work has been done to use these results to extract information about the target state in the thermodynamic limit. In this work, we employ recurrent neural networks (RNNs) as a variational ans\"atze, and leverage their recurrent nature to simulate the ground states of progressively larger systems through iterative retraining. This transfer learning technique allows us to simulate spin-12\frac{1}{2}21​ systems on lattices with more than 1,000 spins without beginning optimization from scratch for each system size, thus reducing the demands for computational resources. In this study, we focus on the square-lattice antiferromagnetic Heisenberg model, where it is possible to carefully benchmark our results. We show that we are able to systematically improve the accuracy of the results from our simulations by increasing the training time, and obtain results for finite-sized lattices that are in good agreement with the literature values. Furthermore, we use these results to extract accurate estimates of the ground-state properties in the thermodynamic limit. This work demonstrates that RNN wavefunctions are able to extract accurate information about quantum many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit.
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