Holographic dynamics from multiscale entanglement renormalization ansatz

Abstract

The Multiscale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA) is a tensor network based variational ansatz that is capable of capturing many of the key physical properties of strongly correlated ground states such as criticality and topological order. MERA also shares many deep relationships with the AdS/CFT (gauge-gravity) correspondence by realizing a UV complete holographic duality within the tensor networks framework. Motivated by this, we have re-purposed the MERA tensor network as an analysis tool to study the real-time evolution of the 1D transverse Ising model in its low energy excited state sector. We performed this analysis by allowing the ancilla qubits of the MERA tensor network to acquire quantum fluctuations, which yields a unitary transform between the physical (boundary) and ancilla qubit (bulk) Hilbert spaces. This then defines a reversible quantum circuit which is used as a `holographic transform' to study excited states and their real-time dynamics from the point of the bulk ancillae. In the gapped paramagnetic phase of the transverse field Ising model, we demonstrate the holographic duality between excited states induced by single spin-flips (Ising `magnons') acting on the ground state and single ancilla qubit spin-flips. The single ancillae qubit excitation is shown to be stable in the bulk under real-time evolution and hence defines a stable holographic quasiparticle which we have named the `hologron'. The `dictionary' between the bulk and boundary is determined and realizes many features of the holographic correspondence in a non-CFT limit of the boundary theory. As an added spin-off, this dictionary together with the extension to multi-hologron sectors gives us a systematic way to construct quantitatively accurate low energy effective Hamiltonians.