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Implementations and applications of Renyi entanglement in Monte Carlo simulations of spin models

Stephen Inglis

Published Sep 27, 2013• 8 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Although entanglement is a well studied property in the context of quantum systems, the ability to measure it in Monte Carlo methods is relatively new. \nThrough measures of the Renyi entanglement entropy and mutual information one is able to examine and characterize criticality, pinpoint phase transitions, and probe universality. \nWe describe the most basic algorithms for calculating these quantities in straightforward Monte Carlo methods and state of the art techniques used in high performance computing. \nThis description emphasizes the core principal of these measurements and allows one to both build an intuition for these quantities and how they are useful in numerical studies. \n \nUsing the Renyi entanglement entropy we demonstrate the ability to detect thermal phase transitions in the Ising model and XY model without use of an order parameter. \nThe scaling near the critical point also shows signatures identifying the universality class of the model. \nImproved methods are explored using extended ensemble techniques that can increase calculation efficiency, and show good agreement with the standard approach. \nWe explore the "ratio trick" at finite temperature and use it to explore the quantum critical fan of the one dimensional transverse field Ising model, showing agreement with finite temperature and finite size scaling from field theory. \nThis same technique is used at zero temperature to explore the geometric dependence of the entanglement entropy and examine the universal scaling functions in the two dimensional transverse field Ising model. \nAll of this shows the multitude of ways in which the study of the Renyi entanglement entropy can be efficiently and practically used in conventional and exotic condensed matter systems, and should serve as a reference for those wishing to use it as a tool.

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Although entanglement is a well studied property in the context of quantum systems, the ability to measure it in Monte Carlo methods is relatively new. \nThrough measures of the Renyi entanglement entropy and mutual information one is able to examine and characterize criticality, pinpoint phase transitions, and probe universality. \nWe describe the most basic algorithms for calculating these quantities in straightforward Monte Carlo methods and state of the art techniques used in high performance computing. \nThis description emphasizes the core principal of these measurements and allows one to both build an intuition for these quantities and how they are useful in numerical studies. \n \nUsing the Renyi entanglement entropy we demonstrate the ability to detect thermal phase transitions in the Ising model and XY model without use of an order parameter. \nThe scaling near the critical point also shows signatures identifying the universality class of the model. \nImproved methods are explored using extended ensemble techniques that can increase calculation efficiency, and show good agreement with the standard approach. \nWe explore the "ratio trick" at finite temperature and use it to explore the quantum critical fan of the one dimensional transverse field Ising model, showing agreement with finite temperature and finite size scaling from field theory. \nThis same technique is used at zero temperature to explore the geometric dependence of the entanglement entropy and examine the universal scaling functions in the two dimensional transverse field Ising model. \nAll of this shows the multitude of ways in which the study of the Renyi entanglement entropy can be efficiently and practically used in conventional and exotic condensed matter systems, and should serve as a reference for those wishing to use it as a tool.
At the interface of quantum information and condensed matter physics, the study of entanglement in quantum many-body systems requires a new toolset which combines concepts from each. This thesis introduces a set of computational methods to study phases and phase transitions in lattice models of quantum systems, using the Renyi entropies as a means of quantifying entanglement. The scaling of entanglement entropy can give valuable insight into the phase of a condensed matter system. It can be used to detect exotic types of phases, to pinpoint transitions between phases, and can give us universal information about a system. \nThe first approach in this thesis is a technique to measure entanglement in finite size \nlattice systems using zero-temperature quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The algorithm \nis developed, implemented, and used to explore anomalous entanglement scaling terms in \nthe spin-1/2 Heisenberg antiferromagnet. \nIn the second part of this thesis, a new and complementary numerical technique is introduced to study entanglement not just in finite size systems, but as we approach the thermodynamic limit. This “numerical linked-cluster expansion” is used to study two different systems at their quantum critical points — continuous phase transitions occurring at zero temperature, at which these systems exhibit universal properties. Remarkably, these universal properties can be reflected in the scaling of entanglement. \nEntanglement offers a new perspective on condensed matter systems, one which takes us closer to genuinely understanding what goes on in these materials at the quantum mechanical level. This thesis demonstrates the first steps in developing an extensive list of computational tools that can be used to study entanglement over a wide range of interacting quantum many-body systems. With the ever increasing computational power available, it may be only a matter of time before these tools are used to create a comprehensive framework for the characterization of condensed matter phases and phase transitions.
Our understanding of physical phenomena hinges on finding universal core mechanisms that unite them. The concept of universality is deeply ingrained in the study of quantum many-body systems. At zero temperature, microscopically different systems with long-range order collapse into their universal state described by a handful of universal parameters. Establishing those parameters implies identification of the universal theory that is effectively describing the system and ultimately providing the desired understanding. We take up this task with the help of Renyi entanglement entropy. Defined with respect to a system bipartition, this measure quantifies information shared between the subsystems. Understanding what insights into universality are encoded within this information-theoretic quantity as well as developing numerical tools to efficiently estimate the Renyi entanglement entropy are the subjects of this thesis. \n \nOn the computational end of this far-reaching goal, we develop a novel theoretical framework for constructing improved Renyi entanglement entropy estimators in the context of d+1 quantum Monte Carlo methods. The discovery of a connection of this methodology to the well-established Kandel-Domany formalism provides a clear path towards generalization. Additionally, we embrace a data-driven approach towards learning the ground state wavefunction. We demonstrate how a restricted Boltzmann machine can be used to reconstruct the Renyi entanglement entropy from projective measurements of a quantum ground state. Furthermore, we extend this classical generative architecture to a quantum analogue that we call the quantum Boltzmann machine. \n \nOn the theoretical side of this endeavour, we study the Renyi entanglement entropy scaling terms for two quantum lattice models embedded in two dimensional space via extensive quantum Monte Carlo simulations. For the ground state of the XY model, we provide conclusive numerical evidence for a logarithmic contribution that uniquely characterizes the continuous symmetry of the emerging order parameter. Moreover, we confirm the form of the subleading universal geometric contribution arising due to the bosonic nature of low-energy degrees of freedom in this model. For the critical ground state of the transverse field Ising model, we develop a novel scaling procedure to extract a universal number κ revealed via a cylindrical entangling bipartition in the thin-slice limit. The combined product of our work sheds new light on the entanglement-based classification of universality and brings a suite of new powerful numerical tools to continue illuminating this theoretical program in the future.
We implement a Wang-Landau sampling technique in quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) simulations for the purpose of calculating the Rényi entanglement entropies and associated mutual information. The algorithm converges an estimate for an analog to the density of states for stochastic series expansion QMC, allowing a direct calculation of Rényi entropies without explicit thermodynamic integration. We benchmark results for the mutual information on two-dimensional (2D) isotropic and anisotropic Heisenberg models, a 2D transverse field Ising model, and a three-dimensional Heisenberg model, confirming a critical scaling of the mutual information in cases with a finite-temperature transition. We discuss the benefits and limitations of broad sampling techniques compared to standard importance sampling methods.
By developing a method to represent the Renyi entropies via a replica trick on classical statistical mechanical systems, we introduce a procedure to calculate the Renyi mutual information (RMI) in any Monte Carlo simulation. Through simulations on several classical models, we demonstrate that the RMI can detect finite-temperature critical points, and even identify their universality class, without knowledge of an order parameter or other thermodynamic estimators. Remarkably, in addition to critical points mediated by symmetry breaking, the RMI is able to detect topological vortex-unbinding transitions, as we explicitly demonstrate on simulations of the XYXYXY model.
Quantum magic, or nonstabilizerness, provides a crucial characterization of quantum systems, regarding the classical simulability with stabilizer states. In this work, we propose an alternative and efficient algorithm for computing stabilizer R\'enyi entropy, one of the measures for quantum magic, in spin systems with sign-problem free Hamiltonians. This algorithm is based on the quantum Monte Carlo simulation of the path integral of the work between two partition function ensembles and it applies to all spatial dimensions and temperatures. We demonstrate this algorithm on the one- and two-dimensional transverse field Ising model at both finite and zero temperatures and show the quantitative agreements with tensor-network based algorithms. We analyze the computational cost and provide analytical and numerical evidences for it to be polynomial in system size. This work also suggests a unifying framework for calculating various types of entropy quantities including entanglement R\'enyi entropy and entanglement R\'enyi negativity.
We present a general scheme for the calculation of the R\'enyi entropy of a subsystem in quantum many-body models that can be efficiently simulated via quantum Monte Carlo. When the simulation is performed at very low temperature, the above approach delivers the entanglement R\'enyi entropy of the subsystem, and it allows us to explore the crossover to the thermal R\'enyi entropy as the temperature is increased. We implement this scheme explicitly within the stochastic series expansion as well as within path-integral Monte Carlo, and apply it to quantum spin and quantum rotor models. In the case of quantum spins, we show that relevant models in two dimensions with reduced symmetry (XXXXXX model or hard-core bosons, transverse-field Ising model at the quantum critical point) exhibit an area law for the scaling of the entanglement entropy.