Multilayer wave functions: A recursive coupling of local excitations

Finding a succinct representation to describe the ground state of a disordered interacting system could be very helpful in understanding the interplay between the interactions that is manifested in a quantum phase transition. In this work we use some elementary states to construct recursively an ansatz of multilayer wave functions, where in each step the higher-level wave function is represented by a superposition of the locally "excited states" obtained from the lower-level wave function. This allows us to write the Hamiltonian expectation in terms of some local functions of the variational parameters, and employ an efficient message-passing algorithm to find the optimal parameters. We obtain good estimations of the ground-state energy and the phase transition point for the transverse Ising model with a few layers of mean-field and symmetric tree states. The work is the first step towards the application of local and distributed message-passing algorithms in the study of structured variational problems in finite dimensions.Comment: 23 pages, including 3 appendices and 6 figures. A shortened version published in EP

Sign problem in the Bethe approximation

We propose a message-passing algorithm to compute the Hamiltonian expectation with respect to an appropriate class of trial wave functions for an interacting system of fermions. To this end, we connect the quantum expectations to average quantities in a classical system with both local and global interactions, which are related to the variational parameters and use the Bethe approximation to estimate the average energy within the replica-symmetric approximation. The global interactions, which are needed to obtain a good estimation of the average fermion sign, make the average energy a nonlocal function of the variational parameters. We use some heuristic minimization algorithms to find approximate ground states of the Hubbard model on random regular graphs and observe significant qualitative improvements with respect to the mean-field approximation.Comment: 19 pages, 9 figures, one figure adde

Low-temperature excitations within the Bethe approximation

We propose the variational quantum cavity method to construct a minimal energy subspace of wave vectors that are used to obtain some upper bounds for the energy cost of the low-temperature excitations. Given a trial wave function we use the cavity method of statistical physics to estimate the Hamiltonian expectation and to find the optimal variational parameters in the subspace of wave vectors orthogonal to the lower-energy wave functions. To this end, we write the overlap between two wave functions within the Bethe approximation which allows us to replace the global orthogonality constraint with some local constraints on the variational parameters. The method is applied to the transverse Ising model and different levels of approximations are compared with the exact numerical solutions for small systems.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Bethe free-energy approximations for disordered quantum systems

Given a locally consistent set of reduced density matrices, we construct approximate density matrices which are globally consistent with the local density matrices we started from when the trial density matrix has a tree structure. We employ the cavity method of statistical physics to find the optimal density matrix representation by slowly decreasing the temperature in an annealing algorithm, or by minimizing an approximate Bethe free energy depending on the reduced density matrices and some cavity messages originated from the Bethe approximation of the entropy. We obtain the classical Bethe expression for the entropy within a naive (mean-field) approximation of the cavity messages, which is expected to work well at high temperatures. In the next order of the approximation, we obtain another expression for the Bethe entropy depending only on the diagonal elements of the reduced density matrices. In principle, we can improve the entropy approximation by considering more accurate cavity messages in the Bethe approximation of the entropy. We compare the annealing algorithm and the naive approximation of the Bethe entropy with exact and approximate numerical simulations for small and large samples of the random transverse Ising model on random regular graphs.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figures, 4 appendice