Adiabatic transport of neural network quantum states

Abstract

Variational methods have offered controllable and powerful tools for capturing many-body quantum physics for decades. The recent introduction of expressive neural network quantum states has enabled the accurate representation of a broad class of complex wavefunctions for many Hamiltonians of interest. We introduce a first-principles method for building neural network representations of many-body excited states by adiabatically continuing eigenstates of simple Hamiltonians into the strongly correlated regime. With controlled access to the full many-body gap, we obtain accurate estimates of critical exponents. Successive eigenstate estimates can be run entirely in parallel, enabling precise targeting of excited-state properties without reference to the rest of the spectrum, opening the door to large-scale numerical investigations of universal properties of entire phases of matter.