Neural Gutzwiller-projected variational wave functions

Variational wave functions have enabled exceptional scientific breakthroughs related to the understanding of novel phases of matter. Examples include the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity, the description of the fractional quantum Hall effect through the Laughlin state, and Feynman's variational understanding of large-scale quantum effects in liquid helium. More recently, Gutzwiller-projected wave functions, typically constructed from fermionic degrees of freedom, have been employed to examine quantum spin models in the presence of competing interactions, where exotic phases with no spontaneous symmetry breaking and fractional excitations may exist. In this work, we investigate the aforementioned fermionic wave functions supplemented with neural networks, specifically with the so-called restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM), to boost their accuracy and obtain reliable approximations to the ground state of generic spin models. In particular, we apply our neural augmented fermionic construction to the description of both magnetically ordered and disordered phases of increasing complexity, including cases where the ground state displays a nontrivial sign structure. Even though the RBM state is by far more effective for Néel states endowed with a particularly simple sign structure, it provides a significant improvement over the original fermionic state in highly frustrated regimes where a complex sign structure is anticipated, thus marking the path to an understanding of strongly correlated spin models on the lattice via neural Gutzwiller-projected variational wave functions.