Learning spin liquids on a honeycomb lattice with artificial neural networks

Abstract

Machine learning methods provide a new perspective on the study of many-body system in condensed matter physics and there is only limited understanding of their representational properties and limitations in quantum spin liquid systems. In this work, we investigate the ability of the machine learning method based on the restricted Boltzmann machine in capturing physical quantities including the ground-state energy, spin-structure factor, magnetization, quantum coherence, and multipartite entanglement in the two-dimensional ferromagnetic spin liquids on a honeycomb lattice. It is found that the restricted Boltzmann machine can encode the many-body wavefunction quite well by reproducing accurate ground-state energy and structure factor. Further investigation on the behavior of multipartite entanglement indicates that the residual entanglement is richer in the gapless phase than the gapped spin-liquid phase, which suggests that the residual entanglement can characterize the spin-liquid phases. Additionally, we confirm the existence of a gapped non-Abelian topological phase in the spin liquids on a honeycomb lattice with a small magnetic field and determine the corresponding phase boundary by recognizing the rapid change of the local magnetization and residual entanglement.