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Quantum state of multiple particles represented as complex matrices
A matrix product state (MPS) is a representation of a quantum many-body state. It is at the core of the one of the most effective algorithms for solving one dimensional strongly correlated quantum systems – the density matrix renormalization group (DMRG) algorithm.
For a system of spins of dimension , the general form of the MPS for periodic boundary conditions (PBS) can be written in the following form:
For open boundary conditions (OBC), takes the form
Here are the matrices ( is the dimension of the virtual subsystems) and are the single-site basis states. For periodic boundary conditions, we consider , and for open boundary conditions . The parameter is related to the entanglement between particles. In particular, if the state is a product state (i.e. not entangled at all), it can be described as a matrix product state with . represents a -dimensional local space on site . For qubits, . For qudits (d-level systems), .
For states that are translationally symmetric, we can choose: In general, every state can be written in the MPS form (with growing exponentially with the particle number N). Note that the MPS decomposition is not unique. MPS are practical when is small – for example, does not depend on the particle number. Except for a small number of specific cases (some mentioned in the section Examples), such a thing is not possible, though in many cases it serves as a good approximation.
For introductions see, and. In the context of finite automata see. For emphasis placed on the graphical reasoning of tensor networks, see the introduction.
Wave function as a Matrix Product State
For a system of lattice sites each of which has a -dimensional Hilbert space, the completely general state can be written as
where is a -dimensional tensor. For example, the wave function of the system described by the Heisenberg model is defined by the dimensional tensor, whereas for the Hubbard model the rank is .
The main idea of the MPS approach is to separate physical degrees of freedom of each site, so that the wave function can be rewritten as the product of matrices, where each matrix corresponds to one particular site. The whole procedure includes the series of reshaping and singular value decompositions (SVD).
There are three ways to represent wave function as an MPS: left-canonical decomposition, right-canonical decomposition, and mixed-canonical decomposition.
Left-Canonical Decomposition
The decomposition of the -dimensional tensor starts with the separation of the very left index, i.e., the first index , which describes physical degrees of freedom of the first site. It is performed by reshaping as follows
In this notation, is treated as a row index, as a column index, and the coefficient is of dimension . The SVD procedure yields
In the relation above, matrices and are multiplied and form the matrix and . stores the information about the first lattice site. It was obtained by decomposing matrix into row vectors with entries . So, the state vector takes the form
The separation of the second site is performed by grouping and , and representing as a matrix of dimension . The subsequent SVD of can be performed as follows:
.
Above we replace by a set of matrices of dimension with entries . The dimension of is with . Hence,
Following the steps described above, the state can be represented as a product of matrices
The maximal dimensions of the -matrices take place in the case of the exact decomposition, i.e., assuming for simplicity that is even, going from the first to the last site. However, due to the exponential growth of the matrix dimensions in most of the cases it is impossible to perform the exact decomposition.
The dual MPS is defined by replacing each matrix with :
Note that each matrix in the SVD is a semi-unitary matrix with property . This leads to
.
To be more precise, . Since matrices are left-normalized, we call the composition left-canonical.
Right-Canonical Decomposition
Similarly, the decomposition can be started from the very right site. After the separation of the first index, the tensor transforms as follows:
.
The matrix was obtained by multiplying matrices and , and the reshaping of into column vectors forms . Performing the series of reshaping and SVD, the state vector takes the form
Since each matrix in the SVD is a semi-unitary matrix with property , the -matrices are right-normalized and obey . Hence, the decomposition is called right-canonical.
Mixed-Canonical Decomposition
The decomposition performs from both the right and from the left. Assuming that the left-canonical decomposition was performed for the first n sites, can be rewritten as
.
In the next step, we reshape as and proceed with the series of reshaping and SVD from the right up to site :
can be expressed as a Matrix Product State, up to normalization, with
or equivalently, using notation from:
This notation uses matrices with entries being state vectors (instead of complex numbers), and when multiplying matrices using tensor product for its entries (instead of product of two complex numbers). Such matrix is constructed as