Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Log inSign up
Challenges
Datasets
Workspaces
Papers
Discussions
Leaderboard
Blog
Job Board
Q3AS

© 2026 Aqora Quantum S.A.S.

TermsPrivacyLegal Notice

PRX Quantum

How To Use Neural Networks To Investigate Quantum Many-Body Physics

Juan Carrasquilla, Giacomo Torlai

Published Nov 12, 2021• 75 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Over the past few years, machine learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool to tackle complex problems in a broad range of scientific disciplines.In particular, artificial neural networks have been successfully used to mitigate the exponential complexity often encountered in quantum many-body physics, the study of properties of quantum systems built from a large number of interacting particles.In this article, we review some applications of neural networks in condensed matter physics and quantum information, with particular emphasis on hands-on tutorials serving as a quick start for a newcomer to the field.The prerequisites of this tutorial are basic probability theory and calculus, linear algebra, basic notions of neural networks, statistical physics, and quantum mechanics.The reader is introduced to supervised machine learning with convolutional neural networks to learn a phase transition, unsupervised learning with restricted Boltzmann machines to perform quantum tomography, and the variational Monte Carlo method with recurrent neural networks for approximating the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian.For each algorithm, we briefly review the key ingredients and their corresponding neuralnetwork implementation, and show numerical experiments for a system of interacting Rydberg atoms in two dimensions.

DOI
10.1103/prxquantum.2.040201

Related papers

Neural networks in quantum many-body physics: a hands-on tutorial

Juan Carrasquilla, Giacomo Torlai

Over the past years, machine learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool to tackle complex problems over a broad range of scientific disciplines. In particular, artificial neural networks have been successfully deployed to mitigate the exponential complexity often encountered in quantum many-body physics, the study of properties of quantum systems built out of a large number of interacting particles. In this Article, we overview some applications of machine learning in condensed matter physics and quantum information, with particular emphasis on hands-on tutorials serving as a quick-start for a newcomer to the field. We present supervised machine learning with convolutional neural networks to learn a phase transition, unsupervised learning with restricted Boltzmann machines to perform quantum tomography, and variational Monte Carlo with recurrent neural-networks for approximating the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian. We briefly review the key ingredients of each algorithm and their corresponding neural-network implementation, and show numerical experiments for a system of interacting Rydberg atoms in two dimensions.

arXiv:2101.11099•Jan 26, 2021•10 citations

Explorations in machine learning for interacting many-body systems.

Jonathon Matthew Schulz-Beach

Most interacting many-body systems in physics are not analytically solvable. Instead, numerical methods are needed for the study of these complex and high-dimensional problems. At present, there are many interesting problems in strongly correlated systems that remain unsolved with current methods. At the heart of this problem is finding an efficient representation that incorporates symmetries, correlations and general features. \n \nIn the context of computer science, machine learning techniques have had astonishing success at reducing the dimensionality of data. The leading method is through the use of artificial neural networks. These networks have been enormously successful at sifting through vast amounts of data to find patterns and regularities. In a sense, neural networks are themselves a statistical system whose properties are adjusted to mimic the features of the data. By finding an effective low-dimensional representation of the data, machine learning has greatly subdued the curse of dimensionality found in many real-world problems. \n \nIn this Thesis, we apply several machine learning techniques to the study of interacting many-body systems in classical and quantum statistical physics. We explore supervised classification of phases of matter with an emphasis on physical interpretation of the net- work. In doing so, we design a custom network architecture that possesses rotational symmetry as an inductive bias. We further investigate connections between the renormalization group and deep learning through applying a super-resolving neural network to the classical Ising model. Towards experimental efforts, we also repurpose generative machine learning to quantum state tomography for the calibration and testing of quantum devices. We conclude with a latent variable model inspired by near-term quantum algorithms. This maps to a variational Monte Carlo ansatz that produces samples efficiently for interacting quantum systems.

•Sep 3, 2020•0 citations

Quantum Neural Network States

Zhian Jia, Biao Yi, Rui Zhai +3 more

One of the main challenges of quantum many-body physics is that the dimensionality of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size, which makes it extremely difficult to solve the Schrodinger equations of the system. But typically, many physical systems have a simplified internal structure which makes the parameters needed to characterize their ground states exponentially smaller. This makes many numerical methods possible in capture the physics of the system. Among these modern numerical techniques, neural networks, which show great power in approximating functions and extracting features of the big data, are now attracting many interests. Neural network representation of quantum many-body states shows great potential in solving some traditionally difficult quantum problems involving large number of freedoms. In this work, we briefly review the progress of using the artificial neural network to build quantum many-body ansatz states. We take Boltzmann machine representation as a prototypical example to illustrate various aspects of neural network representation of quantum many-body states. We first briefly review the classical neural networks, then we illustrate how to use neural networks to represent quantum states and density operators. Some physical properties of the neural network states, including entanglement features, representational power, and the relation with tensor network states, are discussed. For applications, we briefly review the progress of many-body calculating based on neural network states, neural network state approach to tomography, and also the classical simulation of quantum computing based on Boltzmann machine states. At the end of the work, some outlooks and open problems are given.

•Aug 31, 2018•1 citation

Quantum Neural Network States: A Brief Review of Methods and Applications

Zhih‐Ahn Jia, Biao Yi, Rui Zhai +3 more

Abstract One of the main challenges of quantum many‐body physics is the exponential growth in the dimensionality of the Hilbert space with system size. This growth makes solving the Schrödinger equation of the system extremely difficult. Nonetheless, many physical systems have a simplified internal structure that typically makes the parameters needed to characterize their ground states exponentially smaller. Many numerical methods then become available to capture the physics of the system. Among modern numerical techniques, neural networks, which show great power in approximating functions and extracting features of big data, are now attracting much interest. In this work, the progress in using artificial neural networks to build quantum many‐body states is reviewed. The Boltzmann machine representation is taken as a prototypical example to illustrate various aspects of the neural network states. The classical neural networks are also briefly reviewed, and it is illustrated how to use neural networks to represent quantum states and density operators. Some physical properties of the neural network states are discussed. For applications, the progress in many‐body calculations based on neural network states, the neural network state approach to tomography, and the classical simulation of quantum computing based on Boltzmann machine states are briefly reviewed.

arXiv:1808.10601•Advanced Quantum Technologies•Mar 25, 2019•119 citations

Augmenting Quantum Mechanics with Artificial Intelligence

Giacomo Torlai

The simulation of quantum matter with classical hardware plays a central role in the discovery and development of quantum many-body systems, with far-reaching implications in condensed matter physics and quantum technologies. In general, efficient and sophisticated algorithms are required to overcome the severe challenge posed by the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space of quantum systems. In contrast, hardware built with quantum bits of information are inherently capable of efficiently finding solutions of quantum many-body problems. While a universal and scalable quantum computer is still beyond the horizon, recent advances in qubit manufacturing and coherent control of synthetic quantum matter are leading to a new generation of intermediate scale quantum hardware. \n \nThe complexity underlying quantum many-body systems closely resembles the one encountered in many problems in the world of information and technology. In both contexts, the complexity stems from a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. A powerful strategy in the latter scenario is machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence where large amounts of data are used to extract relevant features and patterns. In particular, artificial neural networks have been demonstrated to be capable of discovering low-dimensional representations of complex objects from high-dimensional dataset, leading to the profound technological revolution we all witness in our daily life. \n \nIn this Thesis, we envision a new paradigm for scientific discovery in quantum physics. On the one hand, we have the essentially unlimited data generated with the increasing amount of highly controllable quantum hardware. On the other hand, we have a set of powerful algorithms that efficiently capture non-trivial correlations from high-dimensional data. Therefore, we fully embrace this data-driven approach to quantum mechanics, and anticipate new exciting possibilities in the field of quantum many-body physics and quantum information science. We revive a powerful stochastic neural network called a restricted Boltzmann machine, which slowly moved out of fashion after playing a central role in the machine learning revolution of the early 2010s. We introduce a neural-network representation of quantum states based on this generative model. We propose a set of algorithms to reconstruct unknown quantum states from measurement data and numerically demonstrate their potential, with important implications for current experiments. These include the reconstruction of experimentally inaccessible properties, such as entanglement, and diagnostics to determine sources of noise. Furthermore, we introduce a machine learning framework for quantum error correction, where a neural network learns the best decoding strategy directly from data. We expect that the full integration between quantum hardware and artificial intelligence will become the gold standard, and will drive the world into the era of fault-tolerant quantum computing and large-scale quantum simulations.

•Dec 4, 2018•3 citations

Traversing quantum many-body Hilbert spaces with neural networks

Douglas Hendry

Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body systems requires dealing with a largeconfiguration space comprised of a set of all possible measurable configurations. The total number of configurations grows exponentially with the size of the system, which makes exact numerical calculations impossible for even moderately sized systems. Since the advent of high-temperature superconductivity and the subsequent interest in strongly correlated phases of matter, progress in the field has been marked by ingenuity of the field to overcome these computational limitations. The first techniques to emerge were inspired by quantum chemistry and based on exact diagonalization[1], which is limited to small clusters, and different variants of quantum Monte Carlo[2], that suffers from the sign problem in fermionic and frustrated systems. Circa 1992, the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] became one of the major breakthroughs of the past few decades. Despite the success of DMRG for one-dimensional(1D) and quasi-one-dimensional geometries, extensions to actual two-dimensional systems remain challenging and applications are constrained to long cylinders and strips. One promising alternative is to combine one the oldest methods, variational wave functions (VWFs), with neural networks, which have been used to recently with great success in machine learning. The focus of this dissertation is on developing novel variational Monte Carlo algorithms to make neural network variational wave functions applicable to many problems in quantum many-body physics. These algorithms draw from existing variational wave-function, tensor network, and machine learning methods. We calculate dynamical spectral functions using the vector correction and Chebyshev expansion method. We do finite temperature calculations with minimally entangled thermal states. Finally, we do ground state calculations for the frustrated J1−J2 Heisenberg model. We benchmark these results using restricted Boltzmann machines as the neural network for the the variational wave-functions.--Author's abstract

•Jan 1, 2023•0 citations
Over the past few years, machine learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool to tackle complex problems in a broad range of scientific disciplines.In particular, artificial neural networks have been successfully used to mitigate the exponential complexity often encountered in quantum many-body physics, the study of properties of quantum systems built from a large number of interacting particles.In this article, we review some applications of neural networks in condensed matter physics and quantum information, with particular emphasis on hands-on tutorials serving as a quick start for a newcomer to the field.The prerequisites of this tutorial are basic probability theory and calculus, linear algebra, basic notions of neural networks, statistical physics, and quantum mechanics.The reader is introduced to supervised machine learning with convolutional neural networks to learn a phase transition, unsupervised learning with restricted Boltzmann machines to perform quantum tomography, and the variational Monte Carlo method with recurrent neural networks for approximating the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian.For each algorithm, we briefly review the key ingredients and their corresponding neuralnetwork implementation, and show numerical experiments for a system of interacting Rydberg atoms in two dimensions.
Over the past years, machine learning has emerged as a powerful computational tool to tackle complex problems over a broad range of scientific disciplines. In particular, artificial neural networks have been successfully deployed to mitigate the exponential complexity often encountered in quantum many-body physics, the study of properties of quantum systems built out of a large number of interacting particles. In this Article, we overview some applications of machine learning in condensed matter physics and quantum information, with particular emphasis on hands-on tutorials serving as a quick-start for a newcomer to the field. We present supervised machine learning with convolutional neural networks to learn a phase transition, unsupervised learning with restricted Boltzmann machines to perform quantum tomography, and variational Monte Carlo with recurrent neural-networks for approximating the ground state of a many-body Hamiltonian. We briefly review the key ingredients of each algorithm and their corresponding neural-network implementation, and show numerical experiments for a system of interacting Rydberg atoms in two dimensions.
Most interacting many-body systems in physics are not analytically solvable. Instead, numerical methods are needed for the study of these complex and high-dimensional problems. At present, there are many interesting problems in strongly correlated systems that remain unsolved with current methods. At the heart of this problem is finding an efficient representation that incorporates symmetries, correlations and general features. \n \nIn the context of computer science, machine learning techniques have had astonishing success at reducing the dimensionality of data. The leading method is through the use of artificial neural networks. These networks have been enormously successful at sifting through vast amounts of data to find patterns and regularities. In a sense, neural networks are themselves a statistical system whose properties are adjusted to mimic the features of the data. By finding an effective low-dimensional representation of the data, machine learning has greatly subdued the curse of dimensionality found in many real-world problems. \n \nIn this Thesis, we apply several machine learning techniques to the study of interacting many-body systems in classical and quantum statistical physics. We explore supervised classification of phases of matter with an emphasis on physical interpretation of the net- work. In doing so, we design a custom network architecture that possesses rotational symmetry as an inductive bias. We further investigate connections between the renormalization group and deep learning through applying a super-resolving neural network to the classical Ising model. Towards experimental efforts, we also repurpose generative machine learning to quantum state tomography for the calibration and testing of quantum devices. We conclude with a latent variable model inspired by near-term quantum algorithms. This maps to a variational Monte Carlo ansatz that produces samples efficiently for interacting quantum systems.
One of the main challenges of quantum many-body physics is that the dimensionality of the Hilbert space grows exponentially with the system size, which makes it extremely difficult to solve the Schrodinger equations of the system. But typically, many physical systems have a simplified internal structure which makes the parameters needed to characterize their ground states exponentially smaller. This makes many numerical methods possible in capture the physics of the system. Among these modern numerical techniques, neural networks, which show great power in approximating functions and extracting features of the big data, are now attracting many interests. Neural network representation of quantum many-body states shows great potential in solving some traditionally difficult quantum problems involving large number of freedoms. In this work, we briefly review the progress of using the artificial neural network to build quantum many-body ansatz states. We take Boltzmann machine representation as a prototypical example to illustrate various aspects of neural network representation of quantum many-body states. We first briefly review the classical neural networks, then we illustrate how to use neural networks to represent quantum states and density operators. Some physical properties of the neural network states, including entanglement features, representational power, and the relation with tensor network states, are discussed. For applications, we briefly review the progress of many-body calculating based on neural network states, neural network state approach to tomography, and also the classical simulation of quantum computing based on Boltzmann machine states. At the end of the work, some outlooks and open problems are given.
Abstract One of the main challenges of quantum many‐body physics is the exponential growth in the dimensionality of the Hilbert space with system size. This growth makes solving the Schrödinger equation of the system extremely difficult. Nonetheless, many physical systems have a simplified internal structure that typically makes the parameters needed to characterize their ground states exponentially smaller. Many numerical methods then become available to capture the physics of the system. Among modern numerical techniques, neural networks, which show great power in approximating functions and extracting features of big data, are now attracting much interest. In this work, the progress in using artificial neural networks to build quantum many‐body states is reviewed. The Boltzmann machine representation is taken as a prototypical example to illustrate various aspects of the neural network states. The classical neural networks are also briefly reviewed, and it is illustrated how to use neural networks to represent quantum states and density operators. Some physical properties of the neural network states are discussed. For applications, the progress in many‐body calculations based on neural network states, the neural network state approach to tomography, and the classical simulation of quantum computing based on Boltzmann machine states are briefly reviewed.
The simulation of quantum matter with classical hardware plays a central role in the discovery and development of quantum many-body systems, with far-reaching implications in condensed matter physics and quantum technologies. In general, efficient and sophisticated algorithms are required to overcome the severe challenge posed by the exponential scaling of the Hilbert space of quantum systems. In contrast, hardware built with quantum bits of information are inherently capable of efficiently finding solutions of quantum many-body problems. While a universal and scalable quantum computer is still beyond the horizon, recent advances in qubit manufacturing and coherent control of synthetic quantum matter are leading to a new generation of intermediate scale quantum hardware. \n \nThe complexity underlying quantum many-body systems closely resembles the one encountered in many problems in the world of information and technology. In both contexts, the complexity stems from a large number of interacting degrees of freedom. A powerful strategy in the latter scenario is machine learning, a subfield of artificial intelligence where large amounts of data are used to extract relevant features and patterns. In particular, artificial neural networks have been demonstrated to be capable of discovering low-dimensional representations of complex objects from high-dimensional dataset, leading to the profound technological revolution we all witness in our daily life. \n \nIn this Thesis, we envision a new paradigm for scientific discovery in quantum physics. On the one hand, we have the essentially unlimited data generated with the increasing amount of highly controllable quantum hardware. On the other hand, we have a set of powerful algorithms that efficiently capture non-trivial correlations from high-dimensional data. Therefore, we fully embrace this data-driven approach to quantum mechanics, and anticipate new exciting possibilities in the field of quantum many-body physics and quantum information science. We revive a powerful stochastic neural network called a restricted Boltzmann machine, which slowly moved out of fashion after playing a central role in the machine learning revolution of the early 2010s. We introduce a neural-network representation of quantum states based on this generative model. We propose a set of algorithms to reconstruct unknown quantum states from measurement data and numerically demonstrate their potential, with important implications for current experiments. These include the reconstruction of experimentally inaccessible properties, such as entanglement, and diagnostics to determine sources of noise. Furthermore, we introduce a machine learning framework for quantum error correction, where a neural network learns the best decoding strategy directly from data. We expect that the full integration between quantum hardware and artificial intelligence will become the gold standard, and will drive the world into the era of fault-tolerant quantum computing and large-scale quantum simulations.
Understanding strongly correlated quantum many-body systems requires dealing with a largeconfiguration space comprised of a set of all possible measurable configurations. The total number of configurations grows exponentially with the size of the system, which makes exact numerical calculations impossible for even moderately sized systems. Since the advent of high-temperature superconductivity and the subsequent interest in strongly correlated phases of matter, progress in the field has been marked by ingenuity of the field to overcome these computational limitations. The first techniques to emerge were inspired by quantum chemistry and based on exact diagonalization[1], which is limited to small clusters, and different variants of quantum Monte Carlo[2], that suffers from the sign problem in fermionic and frustrated systems. Circa 1992, the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) [3, 4, 5, 6, 7] became one of the major breakthroughs of the past few decades. Despite the success of DMRG for one-dimensional(1D) and quasi-one-dimensional geometries, extensions to actual two-dimensional systems remain challenging and applications are constrained to long cylinders and strips. One promising alternative is to combine one the oldest methods, variational wave functions (VWFs), with neural networks, which have been used to recently with great success in machine learning. The focus of this dissertation is on developing novel variational Monte Carlo algorithms to make neural network variational wave functions applicable to many problems in quantum many-body physics. These algorithms draw from existing variational wave-function, tensor network, and machine learning methods. We calculate dynamical spectral functions using the vector correction and Chebyshev expansion method. We do finite temperature calculations with minimally entangled thermal states. Finally, we do ground state calculations for the frustrated J1−J2 Heisenberg model. We benchmark these results using restricted Boltzmann machines as the neural network for the the variational wave-functions.--Author's abstract