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Physics

Neural Networks Identify Topological Phases

Juan Carrasquilla

Published May 22, 2017• 9 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Despite rapidly growing interest in harnessing machine learning in the study of quantum many-body systems, training neural networks to identify quantum phases is a nontrivial challenge.The key challenge is in efficiently extracting essential information from the many-body Hamiltonian or wave function and turning the information into an image that can be fed into a neural network.When targeting topological phases, this task becomes particularly challenging as topological phases are defined in terms of nonlocal properties.Here, we introduce quantum loop topography (QLT): a procedure of constructing a multidimensional image from the "sample" Hamiltonian or wave function by evaluating two-point operators that form loops at independent Monte Carlo steps.The loop configuration is guided by the characteristic response for defining the phase, which is Hall conductivity for the cases at hand.Feeding QLT to a fully connected neural network with a single hidden layer, we demonstrate that the architecture can be effectively trained to distinguish the Chern insulator and the fractional Chern insulator from trivial insulators with high fidelity.In addition to establishing the first case of obtaining a phase diagram with a topological quantum phase transition with machine learning, the perspective of bridging traditional condensed matter theory with machine learning will be broadly valuable.

DOI
10.1103/physics.10.56

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Despite rapidly growing interest in harnessing machine learning in the study of quantum many-body systems, training neural networks to identify quantum phases is a nontrivial challenge.The key challenge is in efficiently extracting essential information from the many-body Hamiltonian or wave function and turning the information into an image that can be fed into a neural network.When targeting topological phases, this task becomes particularly challenging as topological phases are defined in terms of nonlocal properties.Here, we introduce quantum loop topography (QLT): a procedure of constructing a multidimensional image from the "sample" Hamiltonian or wave function by evaluating two-point operators that form loops at independent Monte Carlo steps.The loop configuration is guided by the characteristic response for defining the phase, which is Hall conductivity for the cases at hand.Feeding QLT to a fully connected neural network with a single hidden layer, we demonstrate that the architecture can be effectively trained to distinguish the Chern insulator and the fractional Chern insulator from trivial insulators with high fidelity.In addition to establishing the first case of obtaining a phase diagram with a topological quantum phase transition with machine learning, the perspective of bridging traditional condensed matter theory with machine learning will be broadly valuable.
Despite rapidly growing interest in harnessing machine learning in the study of quantum many-body systems, training neural networks to identify quantum phases is a nontrivial challenge. The key challenge is in efficiently extracting essential information from the many-body Hamiltonian or wave function and turning the information into an image that can be fed into a neural network. When targeting topological phases, this task becomes particularly challenging as topological phases are defined in terms of nonlocal properties. Here, we introduce quantum loop topography (QLT): a procedure of constructing a multidimensional image from the "sample" Hamiltonian or wave function by evaluating two-point operators that form loops at independent Monte Carlo steps. The loop configuration is guided by the characteristic response for defining the phase, which is Hall conductivity for the cases at hand. Feeding QLT to a fully connected neural network with a single hidden layer, we demonstrate that the architecture can be effectively trained to distinguish the Chern insulator and the fractional Chern insulator from trivial insulators with high fidelity. In addition to establishing the first case of obtaining a phase diagram with a topological quantum phase transition with machine learning, the perspective of bridging traditional condensed matter theory with machine learning will be broadly valuable.
After decades of progress and effort, obtaining a phase diagram for a strongly correlated topological system still remains a challenge. Although in principle one could turn to Wilson loops and long-range entanglement, evaluating these nonlocal observables at many points in phase space can be prohibitively costly. With growing excitement over topological quantum computation comes the need for an efficient approach for obtaining topological phase diagrams. Here we turn to machine learning using quantum loop topography (QLT), a notion we have recently introduced. Specifically, we propose a construction of QLT that is sensitive to quasiparticle statistics. We then use mutual statistics between the spinons and visons to detect a Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ quantum spin liquid in a multiparameter phase space. We successfully obtain the quantum phase boundary between the topological and trivial phases using a simple feed-forward neural network. Furthermore, we demonstrate advantages of our approach for the evaluation of phase diagrams relating to speed and storage. Such statistics-based machine learning of topological phases opens new efficient routes to studying topological phase diagrams in strongly correlated systems.
The authors tackle the issue of interpretability in machine learning topological quantum phases in models of Chern insulator, Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ topological insulator, and Z2{\mathbb{Z}}_{2}Z2​ quantum spin liquid. The authors use artificial neural network aided by physical insight underlying the feature selection through quantum loop topography to understand the artificial neural network's decision-making criteria in each of the three cases
The application of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to statistical physic problems has seen a surge of interest for their ability to discriminate phases of matter by extracting essential features in the many-body wavefunction or the ensemble of correlators sampled in Monte Carlo simulations. Here we introduce a gener- alization of supervised machine learning approaches that allows to accurately map out phase diagrams of inter- acting many-body systems without any prior knowledge, e.g. of their general topology or the number of distinct phases. To substantiate the versatility of this approach, which combines convolutional neural networks with quantum Monte Carlo sampling, we map out the phase diagrams of interacting boson and fermion models both at zero and finite temperatures and show that first-order, second-order, and Kosterlitz-Thouless phase transitions can all be identified. We explicitly demonstrate that our approach is capable of identifying the phase transition to non-trivial many-body phases such as superfluids or topologically ordered phases without supervision.
Applications of neural networks to condensed matter physics are becoming popular and beginning to be well accepted. Obtaining and representing the ground and excited state wave functions are examples of such applications. Another application is analyzing the wave functions and determining their quantum phases. Here, we review the recent progress of using the multilayer convolutional neural network, so-called deep learning, to determine the quantum phases in random electron systems. After training the neural network by the supervised learning of wave functions in restricted parameter regions in known phases, the neural networks can determine the phases of the wave functions in wide parameter regions in unknown phases; hence, the phase diagrams are obtained. We demonstrate the validity and generality of this method by drawing the phase diagrams of two- and higher dimensional Anderson metal-insulator transitions and quantum percolations as well as disordered topological systems such as three-dimensional topological insulators and Weyl semimetals. Both real-space and Fourier space wave functions are analyzed. The advantages and disadvantages over conventional methods are discussed.
Identifying quantum phases of matter is key to understanding strongly correlated materials, but remains a challenging task for both conventional computers and current quantum processors. Here, we introduce and implement a hybrid quantum-classical neural network for quantum phase recognition by combining a hardware-efficient parameterized quantum circuit and a feedforward neural network. We jointly train both components with superconducting quantum hardware in the optimization loop, to experimentally demonstrate a classifier for the quantum phases of surface code lattices with up to 4x4 sites in a magnetic field. To learn nonlocal features of the topological phase, we train the hybrid neural network to distinguish topological ground states of the surface code from a featureless ensemble of product states. This allows the trained classifier to distinguish topological ground states from randomly chosen product states, even when subjected to any single-qubit Pauli error. The classifier reaches accuracies above 85% in single-shot measurements, and above 99% when averaging over ten measurements. We expect hybrid neural networks such as the one presented here to be a promising approach for characterizing quantum states in scenarios where classical methods exhibit an unfavorable scaling of sample complexity.