A new method of writing down the path integral for spin-1 Heisenberg antiferromagnetic chain is introduced. In place of the conventional coherent state basis that leads to the non-linear sigma-model, we use a new basis called the fluctuating matrix product states (fMPS) which embodies inter-site entanglement from the outset. It forms an overcomplete set spanning the entire Hilbert space of the spin-1 chain. Saddle-point analysis performed for the bilinear-biquadratic spin model predicts Affeck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki (AKLT) state as the ground state in the vicinity of the AKLT Hamiltonian. Quadratic effective action derived by gradient expansion around the saddle point is free from constraints that plagued the non-linear sigma model and exactly solvable. The obtained excitation modes agree precisely with the single-mode approximation result for the AKLT Hamiltonian. Excitation spectra for other BLBQ Hamiltonians are obtained as well by diagonalizing the quadratic action.
The density-matrix renormalization group method has become a standard computational approach to the low-energy physics as well as dynamics of low-dimensional quantum systems. In this paper, we present a new set of applications, available as part of the ALPS package, that provide an efficient and flexible implementation of these methods based on a matrix-product state (MPS) representation. Our applications implement, within the same framework, algorithms to variationally find the ground state and low-lying excited states as well as simulate the time evolution of arbitrary one-dimensional and two-dimensional models. Implementing the conservation of quantum numbers for generic Abelian symmetries, we achieve performance competitive with the best codes in the community. Example results are provided for (i) a model of itinerant fermions in one dimension and (ii) a model of quantum magnetism.
We present a method for simulating the time evolution of one-dimensional correlated electron-phonon systems which combines the time-evolving block decimation algorithm with a dynamical optimization of the local basis. This approach can reduce the computational cost by orders of magnitude when boson fluctuations are large. The method is demonstrated on the nonequilibrium Holstein polaron by comparison with exact simulations in a limited functional space and on the scattering of an electronic wave packet by local phonon modes. Our study of the scattering problem reveals a rich physics including transient self-trapping and dissipation.
We prove that ground states of gapped local Hamiltonians on an infinite spin chain can be efficiently approximated by matrix product states with a bond dimension which scales as D~(L-1)/epsilon, where any local quantity on L consecutive spins is approximated to accuracy epsilon.
While general quantum many-body systems require exponential resources to be simulated on a classical computer, systems of non-interacting fermions can be simulated exactly using polynomially scaling resources. Such systems may be of interest in their own right, but also occur as effective models in numerical methods for interacting systems, such as Hartree-Fock, density functional theory, and many others. Often it is desirable to solve systems of many thousand constituent particles, rendering these simulations computationally costly despite their polynomial scaling. We demonstrate how this scaling can be improved by adapting methods based on matrix product states, which have been enormously successful for low-dimensional interacting quantum systems, to the case of free fermions. Compared to the case of interacting systems, our methods achieve an exponential speedup in the entanglement entropy of the state. We demonstrate their use to solve systems of up to one million sites with an effective MPS bond dimension of 10^15.
Given a (2+1)D fermionic topological order and a symmetry fractionalization class for a global symmetry group $G$, we show how to construct a (3+1)D topologically invariant path integral for a fermionic $G$ symmetry-protected topological state ($G$-FSPT) in terms of an exact combinatorial state sum. This provides a general way to compute anomalies in (2+1)D fermionic symmetry-enriched topological states of matter. Equivalently, our construction provides an exact (3+1)D combinatorial state sum for a path integral of any FSPT that admits a symmetry-preserving gapped boundary, including the (3+1)D topological insulators and superconductors in class AII, AIII, DIII, and CII that arise in the free fermion classification. Our construction uses the fermionic topological order (characterized by a super-modular tensor category) and symmetry fractionalization data to define a (3+1)D path integral for a bosonic theory that hosts a non-trivial emergent fermionic particle, and then condenses the fermion by summing over closed 3-form $mathbb{Z}_2$ background gauge fields. This procedure involves a number of non-trivial higher-form anomalies associated with Fermi statistics and fractional quantum numbers that need to be appropriately canceled off with a Grassmann integral that depends on a generalized spin structure. We show how our construction reproduces the $mathbb{Z}_{16}$ anomaly indicator for time-reversal symmetric topological superconductors with ${bf T}^2 = (-1)^F$. Mathematically, with standard technical assumptions, this implies that our construction gives a combinatorial state sum on a triangulated 4-manifold that can distinguish all $mathbb{Z}_{16}$ $mathrm{Pin}^+$ smooth bordism classes. As such, it contains the topological information encoded in the eta invariant of the pin$^+$ Dirac operator, thus giving an example of a state sum TQFT that can distinguish exotic smooth structure.