Theoretical Physics research seminar: From knots to spin models to tensor networks

Dr Konstantinos Meichanetzidis (University of Oxford) will present a seminar on his research in theoretical physics.

Spin models are simplified models of complex systems, which however can capture relevant physical behaviour and even exhibit computational universality. The partition function encodes properties of a model instance, and even for very simple models, computing it is a hard counting problem. In this work, we reduce this task into tensor network contraction and we focus on the q-state Potts model. In particular, we evaluate the partition function Z(q) of the q-state Potts model whose interaction pattern is such that Z(q) is a knot invariant. The knot invariant we evaluate is the Jones polynomial, which is a central quantity in the mathematical study of knots. We benchmark our algorithm on a dataset of randomly generated knots and show that for q<5 it shows improved asymptotic performance over the state of the art using moderate computing resources. https://journals.aps.org/pre/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevE.100.033303

The event will be hosted by Dr Zlatko Papic.

All are welcome to attend.