Matrix Product States (MPS) are a particular type of one dimensional tensor network states, that have been applied to the study of numerous quantum many body problems. One of their key features is the possibility to describe and encode symmetries on the level of a single building block (tensor), and hence they provide a natural playground for the study of symmetric systems. In particular, recent works have proposed to use MPS (and higher dimensional tensor networks) for the study of systems with local symmetry that appear in the context of gauge theories. In this work we classify MPS which exhibit local invariance under arbitrary gauge groups. We study the respective tensors and their structure, revealing known constructions that follow known gauging procedures, as well as different, other types of possible gauge invariant states.
Matrix Product States (MPS) are a particular type of one dimensional tensor network states, that have been applied to the study of numerous quantum many body problems. One of their key features is the possibility to describe and encode symmetries on the level of a single building block (tensor), and hence they provide a natural playground for the study of symmetric systems. In particular, recent works have proposed to use MPS (and higher dimensional tensor networks) for the study of systems with local symmetry that appear in the context of gauge theories. In this work we classify MPS which exhibit local invariance under arbitrary gauge groups. We study the respective tensors and their structure, revealing known constructions that follow known gauging procedures, as well as different, other types of possible gauge invariant states.
We classify the different ways in which matrix product states (MPSs) can stay invariant under the action of matrix product operator (MPO) symmetries. This is achieved through a local characterization of how the MPSs, that generate a ground space, remain invariant under a global MPO symmetry. This characterization yields a set of quantities satisfying the coupled pentagon equations, associated with a module category over the fusion category that describes the MPO symmetry. Equivalence classes of these quantities provide complete invariants for an MPO symmetry protected phase: they are robust under continuous deformations of the MPS tensor, and two phases with the same equivalence class can be connected by a symmetric gapped path. Our techniques match and extend the known renormalization fixed point classifications and facilitate the numerical study of these systems. For MPO symmetries described by a group, we recover the symmetry protected topological order classification for unique and degenerate ground states. Moreover, we study the interplay between time reversal symmetry and an MPO symmetry and we also provide examples of our classification, together with explicit constructions based on groups. Finally, we elaborate on the connection between our setup and gapped boundaries of two-dimensional topological systems, where MPO symmetries also play a key role.
Abstract Projected entangled pair states (PEPS) are very useful in the description of strongly correlated systems, partly because they allow encoding symmetries, either global or local (gauge), naturally. In recent years, PEPS with local symmetries have increasingly been used in the study of non-perturbative regimes of lattice gauge theories, most prominently as a way to construct variational ansatz states depending only on a small number of parameters and yet capturing the relevant physical properties. For the case of one-dimensional PEPS (matrix product states—MPS) a bidirectional connection was established between the internal structure of the tensor network, i.e. the mathematical properties of the constituent tensors, and the symmetry. In higher dimensions this has only been done for global symmetries, where in the local (gauge) case it is known only how to construct gauge-invariant states, but not what the symmetry implies on the internal structure of the PEPS. In the present work we complete this missing piece and study the internal structure of PEPS with a gauge symmetry. The PEPS we consider consist of matter and gauge field tensors placed on the vertices and edges, respectively, of arbitrary graphs.
Gauging a global symmetry of a system amounts to introducing new degrees of freedom whose transformation rule makes the overall system observe a local symmetry. In quantum systems there can be obstructions to gauging a global symmetry. When this happens the symmetry is dubbed anomalous. Such obstructions are related to the fact that the global symmetry cannot be written as a tensor product of local operators. In this paper we study nonlocal symmetries that have an additional structure: They take the form of a matrix product operator (MPO). We exploit the tensor network structure of the MPOs to construct local operators from them, satisfying the same group relations; that is, we are able to localize even anomalous MPOs. For nonanomalous MPOs, we use these local operators to explicitly gauge the MPO symmetry of a one-dimensional quantum state obtaining nontrivial gauged states. We show that our gauging procedure satisfies all the desired properties that the standard on-site case does. We also show how this procedure is naturally represented in matrix product states protected by MPO symmetries. In the case of anomalous MPOs, we shed light on the obstructions to gauging these symmetries.
We study the conditions under which Matrix Product States (MPS) or Matrix Product Operators are exact eigenvectors of an extensive local operator, such as a Hamiltonian. By suitably choosing the local operator, this covers a wide range of settings: Exact eigenstates of Hamiltonians, including scar states, exact MPS trajectories for driven quantum systems, steady states of local Lindbladians, generalized symmetries of either Hamiltonians or density matrices, and many more. Our key result is that a local, fixed-size equation---namely, how a single term in the operator acts on a block of tensors---provides a necessary and sufficient condition for exact solutions. This local characterization allows us to obtain the full space of MPS solutions to all of the aforementioned problems; in particular, we exemplify the power of our results by recovering the quantum group symmetries of the XXZ model. We also discuss applications to numerical algorithms with MPS and the generalization of our results to 2D, i.e., projected entangled pair states (PEPS).
In this work, we examine the consequences of the existence of a finite group of matrix product unitary (MPU) symmetries for matrix product states (MPS). We generalize the well-understood picture of onsite unitary symmetries, which give rise to virtual symmetry defects given by insertions of operators in the bonds of the MPS. In the MPU case, we can define analogous defect tensors, this time sitting on lattice sites, that can be created, moved, and fused by local unitary operators. We leverage this formalism to study the gauging of MPU symmetries. We introduce a condition, block independence, under which we can gauge the symmetries by promoting the symmetry defects to gauge degrees of freedom, yielding an MPS of the same bond dimension that supports a local version of the symmetry given by commuting gauge constraints. Whenever block independence does not hold (which happens, in particular, whenever the symmetry representation is anomalous), a modification of our method which we call state-level gauging still gives rise to a locally symmetric MPS by promotion of the symmetry defects, at the expense of producing gauge constraints that do not commute on different sites.
We characterize the conditions under which a translationally invariant matrix product state (MPS) is invariant under local transformations. This allows us to relate the symmetry group of a given state to the symmetry group of a simple tensor. We exploit this result in order to prove and extend a version of the Lieb-Schultz-Mattis theorem, one of the basic results in many-body physics, in the context of MPS. We illustrate the results with an exhaustive search of SU(2)-invariant two-body Hamiltonians which have such MPS as exact ground states or excitations.