Topological Quantum Phase Transitions Retrieved from Manifold Learning
Yanming Che, Clemens Gneiting, Tao Liu, Franco Nori
Abstract
The discovery of topological features of quantum states plays a central role in modern condensed matter physics and various artificial systems. Due to the absence of local order parameters, the detection of topological phase transitions remains a challenge. Machine learning may provide effective methods for identifying topological features. In this work, we show that manifold learning can successfully retrieve topological quantum phase transitions in momentum space. Our results show that the Chebyshev distance (CD) between two data points can successfully capture the main features of topological phase transitions, while the widely used Euclidean distance in general fails. The similarity matrix built upon the CD thus naturally exhibits uncorrelated cluster structures, corresponding to distinct sectors in the topological phase diagram. Then a diffusion map is applied to implement dimensionality reduction and to learn about topological quantum phase transitions in an unsupervised manner. Our demonstrations on the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, the 2D Qi-Wu-Zhang (QWZ) model, and the quenched SSH model show the capability of generic unsupervised learning, when equipped with a suitable distance metric, in exploring topological quantum phase transitions.