Conference

Quantum Cellular Automata are unitary maps that preserve locality and respect causality. I will show that in one spatial dimension they correspond to matrix product unitary operators, and that one can classify them in the presence of symmetries, giving rise to phenomenon analogous to symmetry protection. I will then show that in higher dimensions, they correspond to other tensor networks that fulfill an extra condition and whose bond dimension does not grow with the system size. As a result, they satisfy an area law for the entanglement entropy they can create. I will also define other classes of non-unitary maps, the so-called quantum channels, that either respect causality or preserve locality and show that, whereas the latter obey an area law for the amount of quantum correlations they can create, as measured by the quantum mutual information, theformer may violate it. Additionally, neither of them can be expressed as tensor networks with a bond dimension that is independent of the system size.

There is now significant experimental evidence that the physics of the underdoped cuprates is controlled by a metallic state with a Fermi surface whose volume does not equal the Luttinger value. However, there has been no proposed wavefunction for such a state for electrons in a single band. I will describe a wavefunction which involves tracing over 2 layers of ancilla qubits. The proposal also leads to a gauge theory for the transition to the conventional Fermi liquid state found at large doping.

"AdS/CFT endows gravity in anti-de Sitter (AdS) spacetime with a dual description in certain conformal field theories (CFTs) with matching symmetries. Tensor networks on regular discretizations of AdS space provide natural toy models of AdS/CFT, but break the continuous bulk symmetries. In this talk, we discuss several aspects of such toy models based on tensor networks. We show that this produces a quasiregular conformal field theory (qCFT) on the boundary and rigorously compute its symmetries, entanglement properties, and central charge bounds, applicable to a wide range of existing models. An explicit AdS/qCFT model with exact fractional central charges is given by holographic quantum error correcting codes based on Majorana dimers. These models also realize the strong disorder renormalization group, resulting in new connections between critical condensed-matter models, exact quantum error correction, and holography. If time allows, we will briefly review other recent group research on using tensor network models in quantum many-body physics including many-body localization and time crystals as well as in probabilistic modelling. Based on arXiv:2004.04173, Phys. Rev. A 102, 042407 (2020), Phys. Rev. Research 1, 033079 (2019), Science Advances 5, eaaw0092 (2019)."

In this talk I will give an overview of tensor network approaches to critical systems. I will discuss entanglement scaling laws, show how PEPS can simulate systems with Fermi surfaces, and present some results for simulating systems in the continuum.

The suitability of tensor network ansatzes for the description of physically relevant states in one dimensional lattice gauge theories (LGT) has been demonstrated in the last years by a large amount of systematic studies, including abelian and non-abelian LGTs, and including scenarios where traditional Monte Carlo approaches fail due to a sign problem. While this establishes a solid motivation to extend the program to higher dimensions, a similar systematic study in two dimensions using PEPS requires dealing with specific considerations. Besides a larger computational costs associated to the higher spatial dimension, the presence of plaquette terms in LGTs hinders the efficiency of the most up-to-date PEPS algorithms. With a newly developed update strategy, nevertheless, such terms can be treated by the most efficient techniques. We have used this method to perform the first ab initio iPEPS study of a LGT in 2+1 dimensions: a Z3 invariant model, for which we have determined the phase diagram.