Persistent Ballistic Entanglement Spreading with Optimal Control in Quantum Spin Chains.

Entanglement propagation provides a key routine to understand quantum many-body dynamics in and out of equilibrium. Entanglement entropy (EE) usually approaches to a subsaturation known as the Page value S[over ˜]_{P}=S[over ˜]-dS (with S[over ˜] the maximum of EE and dS the Page correction) in, e.g., the random unitary evolutions. The ballistic spreading of EE usually appears in the early time and will be deviated far before the Page value is reached. In this work, we uncover that the magnetic field that maximizes the EE robustly induces persistent ballistic spreading of entanglement in quantum spin chains. The linear growth of EE is demonstrated to persist until the maximal S[over ˜] (along with a flat entanglement spectrum) is reached. The robustness of ballistic spreading and the enhancement of EE under such an optimal control are demonstrated, considering particularly perturbing the initial state by random pure states (RPSs). These are argued as the results from the endomorphism of the time evolution under such an entanglement-enhancing optimal control for the RPSs.

Tensor Network Efficiently Representing Schmidt Decomposition of Quantum Many-Body States.

Efficient methods to access the entanglement of a quantum many-body state, where the complexity generally scales exponentially with the system size N, have long been a concern. Here we propose the Schmidt tensor network state (Schmidt TNS) that efficiently represents the Schmidt decomposition of finite- and even infinite-size quantum states with nontrivial bipartition boundary. The key idea is to represent the Schmidt coefficients (i.e., entanglement spectrum) and transformations in the decomposition to tensor networks (TNs) with linearly scaled complexity versus N. Specifically, the transformations are written as the TNs formed by local unitary tensors, and the Schmidt coefficients are encoded in a positive-definite matrix product state (MPS). Translational invariance can be imposed on the TNs and MPS for the infinite-size cases. The validity of Schmidt TNS is demonstrated by simulating the ground state of the quasi-one-dimensional spin model with geometrical frustration. Our results show that the MPS encoding the Schmidt coefficients is weakly entangled even when the entanglement entropy of the decomposed state is strong. This justifies the efficiency of using MPS to encode the Schmidt coefficients, and promises an exponential speedup on the full-state sampling tasks.

Cold atoms meet lattice gauge theory.

The central idea of this review is to consider quantum field theory models relevant for particle physics and replace the fermionic matter in these models by a bosonic one. This is mostly motivated by the fact that bosons are more 'accessible' and easier to manipulate for experimentalists, but this 'substitution' also leads to new physics and novel phenomena. It allows us to gain new information about among other things confinement and the dynamics of the deconfinement transition. We will thus consider bosons in dynamical lattices corresponding to the bosonic Schwinger or [Formula: see text] Bose-Hubbard models. Another central idea of this review concerns atomic simulators of paradigmatic models of particle physics theory such as the Creutz-Hubbard ladder, or Gross-Neveu-Wilson and Wilson-Hubbard models. This article is not a general review of the rapidly growing field-it reviews activities related to quantum simulations for lattice field theories performed by the Quantum Optics Theory group at ICFO and their collaborators from 19 institutions all over the world. Finally, we will briefly describe our efforts to design experimentally friendly simulators of these and other models relevant for particle physics. This article is part of the theme issue 'Quantum technologies in particle physics'.

Linearized tensor renormalization group algorithm for the calculation of thermodynamic properties of quantum lattice models.

A linearized tensor renormalization group algorithm is developed to calculate the thermodynamic properties of low-dimensional quantum lattice models. This new approach employs the infinite time-evolving block decimation technique, and allows for treating directly the transfer-matrix tensor network that makes it more scalable. To illustrate the performance, the thermodynamic quantities of the quantum XY spin chain as well as the Heisenberg antiferromagnet on a honeycomb lattice are calculated by the linearized tensor renormalization group method, showing the pronounced precision and high efficiency.

Phase identification in many-body systems by virtual configuration binarization.

Artificial intelligence provides an unprecedented perspective for studying phases of matter in condensed-matter systems. Image segmentation is a basic technique of computer vision that belongs to a branch of artificial intelligence. Inspired by the image segmentation techniques, in this work, we propose a scheme named virtual configuration binarization (VCB) to unveil quantum phases and quantum phase transitions in many-body systems. By encoding the information of renormalized quantum states into a color image and binarize the color image through the VCB, the renormalized quantum states can be visualized, from which quantum phase transitions can be revealed and the corresponding critical points can be identified. Our scheme is benchmarked on several strongly correlated spin systems, which does not depend on the priori knowledge of order parameters of quantum phases. This demonstrates the potential to disclose the underlying structure of quantum phases by the techniques of computer vision.

Tangent-space gradient optimization of tensor network for machine learning.

The gradient-based optimization method for deep machine learning models suffers from gradient vanishing and exploding problems, particularly when the computational graph becomes deep. In this work, we propose the tangent-space gradient optimization (TSGO) for probabilistic models to keep the gradients from vanishing or exploding. The central idea is to guarantee the orthogonality between variational parameters and gradients. The optimization is then implemented by rotating the parameter vector towards the direction of gradient. We explain and test TSGO in tensor network (TN) machine learning, where TN describes the joint probability distribution as a normalized state |ψ〉 in Hilbert space. We show that the gradient can be restricted in tangent space of 〈ψ|ψ〉=1 hypersphere. Instead of additional adaptive methods to control the learning rate η in deep learning, the learning rate of TSGO is naturally determined by rotation angle θ as η=tanθ. Our numerical results reveal better convergence of TSGO in comparison to the off-the-shelf Adam.

Thermodynamics of spin-1/2 Kagomé Heisenberg antiferromagnet: algebraic paramagnetic liquid and finite-temperature phase diagram.

Quantum fluctuations from frustration can trigger quantum spin liquids (QSLs) at zero temperature. However, it is unclear how thermal fluctuations affect a QSL. We employ state-of-the-art tensor network-based methods to explore the ground state and thermodynamic properties of the spin-1/2 kagomé Heisenberg antiferromagnet (KHA). Its ground state is shown to be consistent with a gapless QSL by observing the absence of zero-magnetization plateau as well as the algebraic behaviors of susceptibility and specific heat at low temperatures, respectively. We show that there exists an algebraic paramagnetic liquid (APL) that possesses both the paramagnetic properties and the algebraic behaviors inherited from the QSL. The APL is induced under the interplay between quantum fluctuations from geometrical frustration and thermal fluctuations. By studying the temperature-dependent behaviors of specific heat and magnetic susceptibility, a finite-temperature phase diagram in a magnetic field is suggested, where various phases are identified. This present study gains useful insight into the thermodynamic properties of the spin-1/2 KHA with or without a magnetic field and is helpful for relevant experimental studies.

Ab initio optimization principle for the ground states of translationally invariant strongly correlated quantum lattice models.

In this work, a simple and fundamental numeric scheme dubbed as ab initio optimization principle (AOP) is proposed for the ground states of translational invariant strongly correlated quantum lattice models. The idea is to transform a nondeterministic-polynomial-hard ground-state simulation with infinite degrees of freedom into a single optimization problem of a local function with finite number of physical and ancillary degrees of freedom. This work contributes mainly in the following aspects: (1) AOP provides a simple and efficient scheme to simulate the ground state by solving a local optimization problem. Its solution contains two kinds of boundary states, one of which play the role of the entanglement bath that mimics the interactions between a supercell and the infinite environment, and the other gives the ground state in a tensor network (TN) form. (2) In the sense of TN, a novel decomposition named as tensor ring decomposition (TRD) is proposed to implement AOP. Instead of following the contraction-truncation scheme used by many existing TN-based algorithms, TRD solves the contraction of a uniform TN in an opposite way by encoding the contraction in a set of self-consistent equations that automatically reconstruct the whole TN, making the simulation simple and unified; (3) AOP inherits and develops the ideas of different well-established methods, including the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG), infinite time-evolving block decimation (iTEBD), network contractor dynamics, density matrix embedding theory, etc., providing a unified perspective that is previously missing in this fields. (4) AOP as well as TRD give novel implications to existing TN-based algorithms: A modified iTEBD is suggested and the two-dimensional (2D) AOP is argued to be an intrinsic 2D extension of DMRG that is based on infinite projected entangled pair state. This paper is focused on one-dimensional quantum models to present AOP. The benchmark is given on a transverse Ising chain and 2D classical Ising model, showing the remarkable efficiency and accuracy of the AOP.