We present a general variational approach to determine the steady state of open quantum lattice systems via a neural network approach. The steady-state density matrix of the lattice system is constructed via a purified neural network ansatz in an extended Hilbert space with ancillary degrees of freedom. The variational minimization of cost functions associated to the master equation can be performed using a Markov chain Monte Carlo sampling. As a first application and proof-of-principle, we apply the method to the dissipative quantum transverse Ising model.
We propose a neural-network variational quantum algorithm to simulate the time evolution of quantum many-body systems. Based on a modified restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) wavefunction ansatz, the proposed algorithm can be efficiently implemented in near-term quantum computers with low measurement cost. Using a qubit recycling strategy, only one ancilla qubit is required to represent all the hidden spins in an RBM architecture. The variational algorithm is extended to open quantum systems by employing a stochastic Schrodinger equation approach. Numerical simulations of spin-lattice models demonstrate that our algorithm is capable of capturing the dynamics of closed and open quantum many-body systems with high accuracy without suffering from the vanishing gradient (or barren plateau) issue for the considered system sizes.
The task of classifying the entanglement properties of a multipartite quantum state poses a remarkable challenge due to the exponentially increasing number of ways in which quantum systems can share quantum correlations. Tackling such challenge requires a combination of sophisticated theoretical and computational techniques. In this paper we combine machine-learning tools and the theory of quantum entanglement to perform entanglement classification for multipartite qubit systems in pure states. We use a parameterisation of quantum systems using artificial neural networks in a restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) architecture, known as Neural Network Quantum States (NNS), whose entanglement properties can be deduced via a constrained, reinforcement learning procedure. In this way, Separable Neural Network States (SNNS) can be used to build entanglement witnesses for any target state.
Hybrid quantum-classical algorithms have been proposed as a potentially viable application of quantum computers. A particular example - the variational quantum eigensolver, or VQE - is designed to determine a global minimum in an energy landscape specified by a quantum Hamiltonian, which makes it appealing for the needs of quantum chemistry. Experimental realizations have been reported in recent years and theoretical estimates of its efficiency are a subject of intense effort. Here we consider the performance of the VQE technique for a Hubbard-like model describing a one-dimensional chain of fermions with competing nearest- and next-nearest-neighbor interactions. We find that recovering the VQE solution allows one to obtain the correlation function of the ground state consistent with the exact result. We also study the barren plateau phenomenon for the Hamiltonian in question and find that the severity of this effect depends on the encoding of fermions to qubits. Our results are consistent with the current knowledge about the barren plateaus in quantum optimization.
We initiate the study of neural-network quantum state algorithms for analyzing continuous-variable lattice quantum systems in first quantization. A simple family of continuous-variable trial wavefunctons is introduced which naturally generalizes the restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) wavefunction introduced for analyzing quantum spin systems. By virtue of its simplicity, the same variational Monte Carlo training algorithms that have been developed for ground state determination and time evolution of spin systems have natural analogues in the continuum. We offer a proof of principle demonstration in the context of ground state determination of a stoquastic quantum rotor Hamiltonian. Results are compared against those obtained from partial differential equation (PDE) based scalable eigensolvers. This study serves as a benchmark against which future investigation of continuous-variable neural quantum states can be compared, and points to the need to consider deep network architectures and more sophisticated training algorithms.
Neural-network quantum states have shown great potential for the study of many-body quantum systems. In statistical machine learning, transfer learning designates protocols reusing features of a machine learning model trained for a problem to solve a possibly related but different problem. We propose to evaluate the potential of transfer learning to improve the scalability of neural-network quantum states. We devise and present physics-inspired transfer learning protocols, reusing the features of neural-network quantum states learned for the computation of the ground state of a small system for systems of larger sizes. We implement different protocols for restricted Boltzmann machines on general-purpose graphics processing units. This implementation alone yields a speedup over existing implementations on multi-core and distributed central processing units in comparable settings. We empirically and comparatively evaluate the efficiency (time) and effectiveness (accuracy) of different transfer learning protocols as we scale the system size in different models and different quantum phases. Namely, we consider both the transverse field Ising and Heisenberg XXZ models in one dimension, and also in two dimensions for the latter, with system sizes up to 128 and 8 x 8 spins. We empirically demonstrate that some of the transfer learning protocols that we have devised can be far more effective and efficient than starting from neural-network quantum states with randomly initialized parameters.