Green’s function Monte Carlo method combined with restricted Boltzmann machine approach to the frustrated J 1 – J 2 Heisenberg model

Abstract

Restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) has been proposed as a powerful variational ansatz to represent the ground state of a given quantum many-body system. On the other hand, as a shallow neural network, it is found that the RBM is still hardly able to capture the characteristics of systems with large sizes or complicated interactions. In order to find a way out of the dilemma, here, we propose to adopt the Green’s function Monte Carlo (GFMC) method for which the RBM is used as a guiding wave function. To demonstrate the implementation and effectiveness of the proposal, we have applied the proposal to study the frustrated J 1–J 2 Heisenberg model on a square lattice, which is considered as a typical model with sign problem for quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The calculation results demonstrate that the GFMC method can significantly further reduce the relative error of the ground-state energy on the basis of the RBM variational results. This encourages to combine the GFMC method with other neural networks like convolutional neural networks for dealing with more models with sign problem in the future.