In my talk, I argue that in order to solve the problem of electronic correlation in solids, we need to understand and leverage its structure. To that end, I expose the idea of "latent space" and aim to show its connection to the ancient greek theory of Forms, to techniques already used in physics and chemistry, and to modern machine-learning. Finally, I show how the separation and coupling of length and time scales prevalent in physics can be understood as such latent spaces. This will give rise to quantics tensor trains (QTTs), a powerful and promisting tool for tackling the problem of many correlated electrons.
The correlation functions of quantum systems-central objects in quantum field theories-are defined in high-dimensional space-time domains.Their numerical treatment thus suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which hinders the application of sophisticated many-body theories to interesting problems.Here, we propose a multiscale space-time ansatz for correlation functions of quantum systems based on quantics tensor trains (QTTs), "qubits" describing exponentially different length scales.The ansatz then assumes a separation of length scales by decomposing the resulting high-dimensional tensors into tensor trains (also known as matrix product states).We numerically verify the ansatz for various equilibrium and nonequilibrium systems and demonstrate compression ratios of several orders of magnitude for challenging cases.Essential building blocks of diagrammatic equations, such as convolutions or Fourier transforms, are formulated in the compressed form.We numerically demonstrate the stability and efficiency of the proposed methods for the Dyson and Bethe-Salpeter equations.The QTT representation provides a unified framework for implementing efficient computations of quantum field theories.
Progress in the application of machine learning techniques to the prediction of solid-state and molecular materials properties has been greatly facilitated by the development state-of-the-art feature representations and novel deep learning architectures. A large class of atomic structure representations based on expansions of smoothed atomic densities have been shown to correspond to specific choices of basis sets in an abstract many-body Hilbert space. Concurrently, tensor network structures, conventionally the purview of quantum many-body physics and quantum information, have been successfully applied in supervised and unsupervised learning tasks in computer vision and natural language processing. In this work, we argue that architectures based on tensor networks are well-suited to machine learning on Hilbert-space representations of atomic structures. This is demonstrated on supervised learning tasks involving widely available datasets of density functional theory calculations of metal and semiconductor alloys. In particular, we show that certain standard tensor network topologies exhibit strong generalizability even on small training datasets while being parametrically efficient. We further relate this generalizability to the presence of complex entanglement in the trained tensor networks. We also discuss connections to learning with generalized structural kernels and related strategies for compressing large input feature spaces.
Strong electron correlation is ubiquitous in chemistry and physics. The importance of strong correlation in diverse chemical systems and the failure of traditional electronic structure methods to capture it motivate the current work. We highlight the role of electron pairing in strong correlation and introduce conceptually appealing wavefunction ansätze that can accurately describe strong pairing interactions. Our work builds the foundations of a new generation of quantum chemistry methods which would expand the space of many-electron systems that are accurately understood.
Understanding entanglement remains one of the most intriguing problems in physics. While particle and site entanglement have been studied extensively, the investigation of length- or energy-scale entanglement—quantifying the information exchange between different length scales—has received far less attention. Here, we identify the quantics tensor train (QTT) technique, a matrix product state-inspired approach for overcoming computational bottlenecks in resource-intensive numerical calculations, as a renormalization group method by analytically expressing an exact cyclic reduction-based real-space renormalization scheme in QTT language, which serves as a natural formalism for the method. In doing so, we precisely match the QTT bond dimension—a measure of length-scale entanglement—to the number of rescaled couplings generated in each coarse-graining renormalization step. While QTTs have so far been applied almost exclusively to numerical problems in physics, our analytical calculations demonstrate that they are also powerful tools for mitigating computational costs in semianalytical treatments. We present our results for the one-dimensional tight-binding model with n th -nearest-neighbor hopping, where the 2 n rescaled couplings generated in the renormalization procedure precisely match the QTT bond dimension of the one-particle Green's function.
Quantification of stochastic or quantum systems by a joint probability density or wave function is a notoriously difficult computational problem, since the solution depends on all possible states (or realizations) of the system. Due to this combinatorial flavor, even a system containing as few as ten particles may yield as many as
1010 discretized states. None of even modern supercomputers are capable to cope with this curse of dimensionality straightforwardly, when the amount of quantum particles, for example, grows up to more or less interesting order of hundreds. A traditional approach for a long time was to avoid models formulated in terms of probabilistic functions, and simulate particular system realizations in a randomized process. Since different times in different communities, data-sparse methods came into play. Generally, they aim to define all data points indirectly, by a map from a low amount of representers, and recast all operations (e.g. linear system solution) from the initial data to the effective parameters. The most advanced techniques can be applied (at least, tried) to any given array, and do not rely explicitly on its origin. The current work contributes further progress to this area in the particular direction: tensor product methods for separation of variables. The separation of variables has a long history, and is based on the following elementary concept: a function of many variables may be expanded as a product of univariate functions. On the discrete level, a function is encoded by an array of its values, or a tensor. Therefore, instead of a huge initial array, the separation of variables allows to work with univariate factors with much less efforts. The dissertation contains a short overview of existing tensor representations: canonical PARAFAC, Hierarchical Tucker, Tensor Train (TT) formats, as well as the artificial tensorisation, resulting in the Quantized Tensor Train (QTT) approximation method. The contribution of the dissertation consists in both theoretical constructions and practical numerical algorithms for high-dimensional models, illustrated on the examples of the Fokker-Planck and the chemical master equations. Both arise from stochastic dynamical processes in multiconfigurational systems, and govern the evolution of the probability function in time. A special focus is put on time propagation schemes and their properties related to tensor product methods. We show that these applications yield large-scale systems of linear equations, and prove analytical separable representations of the involved functions and operators. We propose a new combined tensor format (QTT-Tucker), which descends from the TT format (hence TT algorithms may be generalized smoothly), but provides complexity reduction by an order of magnitude. We develop a robust iterative solution algorithm, constituting most advantageous properties of the classical iterative methods from numerical analysis and alternating density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) techniques from quantum physics. Numerical experiments confirm that the new method is preferable to DMRG algorithms. It is as fast as the simplest alternating schemes, but as reliable and accurate as the Krylov methods in linear algebra.
A central problem in modern condensed matter physics is the understanding of materials with strong electron correlations. Despite extensive work, the essential physics of many of these systems is not understood and there is very little ability to make predictions in this class of materials. In this manuscript we share our personal views on the major open problems in the field of correlated electron systems. We discuss some possible routes to make progress in this rich and fascinating field. This manuscript is the result of the vigorous discussions and deliberations that took place at Johns Hopkins University during a three-day workshop January 27, 28, and 29, 2020 that brought together six senior scientists and 46 more junior scientists. Our hope, is that the topics we have presented will provide inspiration for others working in this field and motivation for the idea that significant progress can be made on very hard problems if we focus our collective energies.