Constructing exact representations of quantum many-body systems with deep neural networks

Obtaining accurate properties of many-body interacting quantum matter is a long-standing challenge in theoretical physics and chemistry, rooting into the complexity of the many-body wave-function. Classical representations of many-body states constitute a key tool for both analytical and numerical approaches to interacting quantum problems. Here, we introduce a technique to construct classical representations of many-body quantum systems based on artificial neural networks. Our constructions are based on the deep Boltzmann machine architecture, in which two layers of hidden neurons mediate quantum correlations. The approach reproduces the exact imaginary-time evolution for many-body lattice Hamiltonians, is completely deterministic, and yields networks with a polynomially-scaling number of neurons. We provide examples where physical properties of spin Hamiltonians can be efficiently obtained. Also, we show how systematic improvements upon existing restricted Boltzmann machines ansatze can be obtained. Our method is an alternative to the standard path integral and opens new routes in representing quantum many-body states. Significant improvements in numerical methods for quantum systems often come from finding new ways of representing quantum states that can be optimized and simulated more efficiently. Here the authors demonstrate a method to calculate exact neural network representations of many-body ground states.