Contributor info: Dr Johan Mentink

Martijn D. Bouman, Johan H. Mentink

SciPost Phys. 17, 159 (2024) · published 9 December 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Understanding the speed limits for the propagation of magnons is of key importance for the development of ultrafast spintronics and magnonics. Recently, it was predicted that in 2D antiferromagnets, spin correlations can propagate faster than the highest magnon velocity. Here we gain deeper understanding of this supermagnonic effect based on time-dependent Schwinger boson mean-field theory. We find that the supermagnonic effect is determined by the competition between propagating magnons and a localized quasi-bound state, which is tunable by lattice coordination and quantum spin value $S$, suggesting a new scenario to enhance magnon propagation.

Damian Hofmann, Giammarco Fabiani, Johan H. Mentink, Giuseppe Carleo, Michael A. Sentef

SciPost Phys. 12, 165 (2022) · published 18 May 2022 | Toggle abstract · pdf

Neural-network quantum states (NQS) have been shown to be a suitable variational ansatz to simulate out-of-equilibrium dynamics in two-dimensional systems using time-dependent variational Monte Carlo (t-VMC). In particular, stable and accurate time propagation over long time scales has been observed in the square-lattice Heisenberg model using the Restricted Boltzmann machine architecture. However, achieving similar performance in other systems has proven to be more challenging. In this article, we focus on the two-leg Heisenberg ladder driven out of equilibrium by a pulsed excitation as a benchmark system. We demonstrate that unmitigated noise is strongly amplified by the nonlinear equations of motion for the network parameters, which causes numerical instabilities in the time evolution. As a consequence, the achievable accuracy of the simulated dynamics is a result of the interplay between network expressiveness and measures required to remedy these instabilities. We show that stability can be greatly improved by appropriate choice of regularization. This is particularly useful as tuning of the regularization typically imposes no additional computational cost. Inspired by machine learning practice, we propose a validation-set based diagnostic tool to help determining optimal regularization hyperparameters for t-VMC based propagation schemes. For our benchmark, we show that stable and accurate time propagation can be achieved in regimes of sufficiently regularized variational dynamics.

Giammarco Fabiani, Johan H. Mentink

SciPost Phys. 7, 004 (2019) · published 5 July 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

We investigate the efficiency of the recently proposed Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) representation of quantum many-body states to study both the static properties and quantum spin dynamics in the two-dimensional Heisenberg model on a square lattice. For static properties we find close agreement with numerically exact Quantum Monte Carlo results in the thermodynamical limit. For dynamics and small systems, we find excellent agreement with exact diagonalization, while for systems up to N=256 spins close consistency with interacting spin-wave theory is obtained. In all cases the accuracy converges fast with the number of network parameters, giving access to much bigger systems than feasible before. This suggests great potential to investigate the quantum many-body dynamics of large scale spin systems relevant for the description of magnetic materials strongly out of equilibrium.

Marion M. S. Barbeau, Martin Eckstein, Mikhail I. Katsnelson, Johan H. Mentink

SciPost Phys. 6, 027 (2019) · published 5 March 2019 | Toggle abstract · pdf

In order to have a better understanding of ultrafast electrical control of exchange interactions in multi-orbital systems, we study a two-orbital Hubbard model at half filling under the action of a time-periodic electric field. Using suitable projection operators and a generalized time-dependent canonical transformation, we derive an effective Hamiltonian which describes two different regimes. First, for a wide range of non-resonant frequencies, we find a change of the bilinear Heisenberg exchange $J_{\textrm{ex}}$ that is analogous to the single-orbital case. Moreover we demonstrate that also the additional biquadratic exchange interaction $B_{\textrm{ex}}$ can be enhanced, reduced and even change sign depending on the electric field. Second, for special driving frequencies, we demonstrate a novel spin-charge coupling phenomenon enabling coherent transfer between spin and charge degrees of freedom of doubly ionized states. These results are confirmed by an exact time-evolution of the full two-orbital Mott-Hubbard Hamiltonian.