Frederik Wilde, Augustine Kshetrimayum, Ingo Roth et al.
The physics of a closed quantum mechanical system is governed by its Hamiltonian. However, in most practical situations, this Hamiltonian is not precisely known, and ultimately all there is are data obtained from measurements on the system. In this work, we introduce a highly scalable, data-driven approach to learning families of interacting many-body Hamiltonians from dynamical data, by bringing together techniques from gradient-based optimization from machine learning with efficient quantum state representations in terms of tensor networks. Our approach is highly practical, experimentally friendly, and intrinsically scalable to allow for system sizes of above 100 spins. In particular, we demonstrate on synthetic data that the algorithm works even if one is restricted to one simple initial state, a small number of single-qubit observables, and time evolution up to relatively short times. For the concrete example of the one-dimensional Heisenberg model our algorithm exhibits an error constant in the system size and scaling as the inverse square root of the size of the data set.
Given observations of a physical system, identifying the underlying non-linear governing equation is a fundamental task, necessary both for gaining understanding and generating deterministic future predictions. Of most practical relevance are automated approaches to theory building that scale efficiently for complex systems with many degrees of freedom. To date, available scalable methods aim at a data-driven interpolation, without exploiting or offering insight into fundamental underlying physical principles, such as locality of interactions. In this work, we show that various physical constraints can be captured via tensor network based parameterizations for the governing equation, which naturally ensures scalability. In addition to providing analytic results motivating the use of such models for realistic physical systems, we demonstrate that efficient rank-adaptive optimization algorithms can be used to learn optimal tensor network models without requiring a~priori knowledge of the exact tensor ranks. As such, we provide a physics-informed approach to recovering structured dynamical laws from data, which adaptively balances the need for expressivity and scalability.