Liouville-space neural network representation of density matrices

Abstract

Neural network quantum states such as ansatz wave functions have shown a great deal of promise for finding the ground state of spin models. Recently, work has focused on extending this idea to mixed states for simulating the dynamics of open systems. Most approaches so far have used a purification ansatz where a copy of the system Hilbert space is added, which when traced out gives the correct density matrix. Here we instead present an extension of the restricted Boltzmann machine which directly represents the density matrix in Liouville space. This allows the compact representation of states which appear in mean-field theory. We benchmark our approach on two different versions of the dissipative transverse-field Ising model, which show our ansatz is able to compete with other state-of-the-art approaches. Published by the American Physical Society 2024