## A Touch of Topological Quantum Computation in Haskell Pt. II: Automating Drudgery

Last time we built the basic pieces we need to describe anyons in Haskell. Anyon models describe interesting physical systems where a set of particles (Tau and Id in our case) have certain splitting rules and peculiar quantum properties. The existence of anyons in a system are the core physics necessary to support topological quantum computation. In topological quantum computing, quantum gates are applied by braiding the anyons and measurements performed by fusing anyons together and seeing what particle comes out. Applying gates in this way has inherent error correcting properties.

The tree of particle production with particle labelled leaves picks a basis (think the collection $\{\hat{x}, \hat{y}, \hat{z}\}$ ) for the anyon quantum vector space. An individual basis vector (think $\hat{x}$ ) from this basis is specified by labelling the internal edges of the tree. We built a Haskell data type for a basic free vector space and functions for the basic R-moves for braiding two anyons and reassociating the tree into a new basis with F-moves. In addition, you can move around your focus within the tree by using the function lmap and rmap. The github repo with that and what follows below is here.

#### Pain Points

We’ve built the atomic operations we need, but they work very locally and are quite manual. You can apply many lmap and rmap to zoom in to the leaves you actually wish to braid, and you can manually perform all the F-moves necessary to bring nodes under the same parent, but it will be rather painful.

The standard paper-and-pencil graphical notation for anyons is really awesome. You get to draw little knotty squiggles to calculate. It does not feel as laborious. The human eye and hand are great at applying a sequence of reasonably optimal moves to untangle the diagram efficiently. Our eye can take the whole thing in and our hand can zip around anywhere.

To try and bridge this gap, we need to build functions that work in some reasonable way on the global anyon tree and that automate simple tasks.

#### A Couple Useful Functions

Our first useful operation is pullLeftLeaf. This operation will rearrange the tree using F-moves to get the leftmost leaf associated all the way to the root. The leftmost leaf will then have the root as a parent.

Because the tree structure is in the FibTree a b data type, we need the tuple tree type of the pulled tree. This is a slightly non-trivial type computation.

In order to do this, we’ll use a bit of typelevel programming. If this is strange and alarming stuff for you, don’t sweat it too much. I am not the most elegant user of these techniques, but I hope that alongside my prose description you can get the gist of what we’re going for.

(Sandy Maguire has a new book on typelevel programming in Haskell out. Good stuff. Support your fellow Haskeller and toss him some buckos.)

The resulting tree type b is an easily computable function of the starting tree type a. That is what the “functional dependency” notation | a -> b in the typeclass definition tells the compiler.

The first 4 instances are base cases. If you’re all the way at the leaf, you basically want to do nothing. pure is the function that injects the classical tree description into a quantum state vector with coefficient 1.

The meat is in the last instance. In the case that the tree type matches ((a,b),c), we recursively call PullLeftLeaf on (a,b) which returns a new result (a',b'). Because of the recursion, this a' is the leftmost leaf. We can then construct the return type by doing a single reassociation step. The notation ~ forces two types to unify. We can use this conceptually as an assignment statement at the type level. This is very useful for building intermediate names for large expressions, as assert statements to ensure the types are as expected, and also occasionally to force unification of previously unknown types. It’s an interesting operator for sure.

The recursion at the type level is completely reflected in the actual function definition. We focus on the piece (a,b) inside t by using lmap. We do a recursive call to pullLeftLeaf, and finally fmove' performs the final reassociation move. It is all rather verbose, but straightforward I hope.

You can also build a completely similar PullRightLeaf.

#### A Canonical Right Associated Basis

One common way of dealing with larger trees is to pick a canonical basis of fully right associated trees. The fully right associated tree is a list-like structure. Its uniformity makes it easier to work with.

By recursively applying pullLeftLeaf, we can fully right associate any tree.

This looks quite similar to the implementation of pullLeftLeaf. It doesn’t actually have much logic to it. We apply pullLeftLeaf, then we recursively apply rightAssoc in the right branch of the tree.

#### B-Moves: Braiding in the Right Associated Basis

Now we have the means to convert any structure to it’s right associated canonical basis. In this basis, one can apply braiding to neighboring anyons using B-moves, which can be derived from the braiding R-moves and F-moves.

The B-move applies one F-move so that the two neighboring leaves share a parent, uses the regular braiding R-move, then applies the inverse F-move to return back to the canonical basis. Similarly, bmove'  is the same thing except applies the under braiding braid' rather that the over braiding braid.

(Image Source : Preskill’s notes)

#### Indexing to Leaves

We also may desire just specifying the integer index of where we wish to perform a braid. This can be achieved with another typeclass for iterated rmaping. When the tree is in canonical form, this will enable us to braid two neighboring leaves by an integer index. This index has to be a typelevel number because the output type depends on it.

In fact there is quite a bit of type computation. Given a total tree type s and an index n this function will zoom into the subpart a of the tree at which we want to apply our function. The subpart a is replaced by b, and then the tree is reconstructed into t. t is s with the subpart a mapped into b.  I have intentionally made this reminiscent of the type variables of the lens type Lens s t a b .

This looks much noisier that it has to because we need to work around some of the unfortunate realities of using the typeclass system to compute types. We can’t just match on the number n in order to pick which instance to use because the patterns 0 and n are overlapping. The pattern n can match the number 0 if n ~ 0. The pattern matching in the type instance is not quite the same as the regular Haskell pattern matching we use to define functions. The order of the definitions does not matter, so you can’t have default cases. The patterns you use cannot be unifiable. In order to fix this, we make the condition if n is greater than 0 an explicit type variable gte. Now the different cases cannot unify. It is a very common trick to need a variable representing some branching condition.

For later convenience, we define rmapN which let’s us not need to supply the necessary comparison type gte.

#### Parentifying Leaves Lazily

While it is convenient to describe anyon computations in a canonical basis, it can be quite inefficient. Converting an arbitrary  anyon tree into the standard basis will often result in a dense vector. A natural thing to do for the sake of economy is only do reassociation on demand.

The algorithm for braiding two neighboring leaves is pretty straightforward. We need to reassociate these leaves so that they have the same parent. First we need the ability to map into the least common ancestor of the two leaves. To reassociate these two leaves to have a common parent we pullrightLeaf the left subtree and then pullLeftLeaf the left subtree. Finally, there is a bit extra bit of shuffling to actually get them to be neighbors.

As a first piece, we need a type level function to count the number of leaves in a tree. In this case, I am inclined to use type families rather than multi parameter typeclasses as before, since I don’t need value level stuff coming along for the ride.

Next, we make a typeclass for mapping into the least common ancestor position.

We find the least common ancestor position by doing a binary search on the size of the left subtrees at each node. Once the size of the left subtree equals n, we’ve found the common ancestor of leaf n and leaf n+1.

Again, this LCAMap typeclass has a typelevel argument gte that directs it which direction to go down the tree.

The Twiddle typeclass will perform some final cleanup after we’ve done all the leaf pulling. At that point, the leaves still do not have the same parent. They are somewhere between 0 and 2 F-moves off depending on whether the left or right subtrees may be just a leaf or larger trees. twiddle is not a recursive function.

Putting this all together we get the nmap function that can apply a function after parentifying two leaves. By far the hardest part is writing out that type signature.

#### Usage Example

Here’s some simple usage:

Note that rmapN is 0-indexed but nmap is 1-indexed. This is somewhat horrifying, but that is what was natural in the implementation.

Here is a more extended example showing how to fuse some particles.

I started with the tree at the top and traversed downward implementing each braid and fusion. Implicitly all the particles shown in the diagram are Tau particles. The indices refer to particle position, not to the particles “identity” as you would trace it by eye on the page. Since these are identical quantum  particles, the particles don’t have identity as we classically think of it anyhow.

The particle pairs are indexed by the number on the left particle. First braid 1 over 2, then 2 over 3, fuse 1 and 2, braid 2 under 3, fuse 2 and 3, and then fuse 1 and 2. I got an amplitude for the process of -0.618, corresponding to a probability of 0.382. I would give myself 70% confidence that I implemented all my signs and conventions correctly. The hexagon and pentagon equations from last time being correct gives me some peace of mind.

Syntax could use a little spit polish, but it is usable. With some readjustment, one could use the Haskell do notation removing the need for explicit >>=.

#### Next Time

Anyons are often described in categorical terminology. Haskell has a category culture as well. Let’s explore how those mix!

## A Touch of Topological Quantum Computation in Haskell Pt. I

Quantum computing exploits the massive vector spaces nature uses to describe quantum phenomenon.

The evolution of a quantum system is described by the application of matrices on a vector describing the quantum state of the system. The vector has one entry for every possible state of the system, so the number of entries can get very, very large. Every time you add a new degree of freedom to a system, the size of the total state space gets multiplied by the size of the new DOF, so you have a vector exponentially sized in the  number  of degrees of freedom.

Now, a couple caveats. We could have described probabilistic dynamics similarly, with a probability associated with each state. The subtle difference is that quantum amplitudes are complex numbers whereas probabilities are positive real numbers. This allows for interference. Another caveat is that when you perform a measurement, you only get a single state, so you are hamstrung by the tiny amount of information you can actually extract out of this huge vector. Nevertheless, there are a handful of situations where, to everyone’s best guess, you get a genuine quantum advantage over classical or probabilistic computation.

Topological quantum computing is based around the braiding of particles called anyons. These particles have a peculiar vector space associated with them and the braiding applies a matrix to this space. In fact, the space associated with the particles can basically only be manipulated by braiding and other states require more energy or very large scale perturbations to access. Computing using anyons has a robustness compared to a traditional quantum computing systems. It can be made extremely unlikely that unwanted states are accessed or unwanted gates applied. The physical nature of the topological quantum system has an intrinsic error correcting power. This situation is schematically similar in some ways to classical error correction on a magnetic hard disk. Suppose some cosmic ray comes down and flips a spin in your hard disk. The physics of magnets makes the spin tend to realign with it’s neighbors, so the physics supplies an intrinsic classical error correction in this case.

The typical descriptions of how the vector spaces associated with anyons work I have found rather confusing. What we’re going to do is implement these vector spaces in the functional programming language Haskell for concreteness and play around with them a bit.

###### Anyons

In many systems, the splitting and joining of particles obey rules. Charge has to be conserved. In chemistry, the total number of each individual atom on each side of a reaction must be the same. Or in particle accelerators, lepton number and other junk has to be conserved.

Anyonic particles have their own system of combination rules. Particle A can combine with B to make C or D. Particle B combined with C always make A. That kind of stuff. These rules are called fusion rules and there are many choices, although they are not arbitrary. They can be described by a table $N_{ab}^{c}$ that holds counts of the ways to combine a and b into c. This table has to be consistent with some algebraic conditions, the hexagon and pentagon equations, which we’ll get to later.

We need to describe particle production trees following these rules in order to describe the anyon vector space.

Fibonacci anyons are one of the simplest anyon systems, and yet sufficiently complicated to support universal quantum computation. There are only two particles types in the Fibonacci system, the $I$ particle and the $\tau$  particle. The $I$ particle is an identity particle (kind of like an electrically neutral particle). It combines with $\tau$ to make a $\tau$. However, two $\tau$ particle can combine in two different ways, to make another $\tau$ particle or to make an $I$ particle.

So we make a datatype for the tree structure that has one constructor for each possible particle split and one constructor (TLeaf, ILeaf) for each final particle type. We can use GADTs (Generalize Algebraic Data Types) to make only good particle production history trees constructible. The type has two type parameters carried along with it, the particle at the root of the tree and the leaf-labelled tree structure, represented with nested tuples.

###### Free Vector Spaces

We need to describe quantum superpositions of these anyon trees. We’ll consider the particles at the leaves of the tree to be the set of particles that you have at the current moment in a time. This is a classical quantity. You will not have a superposition of these leaf particles. However, there are some quantum remnants of the history of how these particles were made. The exact history can never be determined, kind of like how the exact history of a particle going through a double slit cannot be determined. However, there is still a quantum interference effect left over. When you bring particles together to combine them, depending on the quantum connections, you can have different possible resulting particles left over with different probabilities. Recombining anyons and seeing what results is a measurement of the system .

Vectors can be described in different basis sets. The bases for anyon trees are labelled by both a tree structure and what particles are at the root and leaves. Different tree associations are the analog of using some basis x vs some other rotated basis x’. The way we’ve built the type level tags in the FibTree reflects this perspective.

The labelling of inner edges of the tree with particles varies depending on which basis vector we’re talking about. A different inner particle is the analog of $\hat{x}$ vs $\hat{y}$.

To work with these bases we need to break out of the mindset that a vector put on a computer is the same as an array. While for big iron purposes this is close to true, there are more flexible options. The array style forces you to use integers to index your space, but what if your basis does not very naturally map to integers?

A free vector space over some objects is the linear combination of those objects. This doesn’t have the make any sense. We can form the formal sum (3.7💋+2.3i👩‍🎨) over the emoji basis for example. Until we attach more meaning to it, all it really means is a mapping between emojis and numerical coefficients. We’re also implying by the word vector that we can add two of the combinations coefficient wise and multiply scalars onto them.

We are going to import free vectors as described by the legendary Dan Piponi as described here: http://blog.sigfpe.com/2007/03/monads-vector-spaces-and-quantum.html

What he does is implement the Free vector space pretty directly. We represent a Vector space using a list of tuples [(a,b)]. The a are basis objects and b are the coefficients attached to them.

The Vector monad factors out the linear piece of a computation. Because of this factoring, the type constrains the mapping to be linear, in a similar way that monads in other contexts might guarantee no leaking of impure computations. This is pretty handy. The function you give to bind correspond to a selector columns of the matrix.

We need some way to zoom into a subtrees and then apply operations. We define the operations lmap and rmap.

You reference a node by the path it takes to get there from the root. For example,  (rmap . lmap . rmap) f applies f at the node that is at the right-left-right position down from the root.

###### Braiding

For Fibonacci anyons, the only two non trivial braidings happen when you braid two $\tau$ particles.

We only have defined how to braid two particles that were split directly from the same particle. How do we describe the braiding for the other cases? Well we need to give the linear transformation for how to change basis into other tree structures. Then we have defined braiding for particles without the same immediate parent also.

###### F-Moves

We can transform to a new basis. where the histories differs by association. We can braid two particles by associating the tree until they are together. An association move does not change any of the outgoing leaf positions. It can, however, change a particle in an interior position. We can apply an F-move anywhere inside the tree, not only at the final leaves.

###### Fusion / Dot product

Two particles that split can only fuse back into themselves. So the definition is pretty trivial. This is like $\hat{e}_i \cdot \hat{e}_j = \delta_{ij}$.

###### Hexagon and Pentagon equations

The F and R matrices and the fusion rules need to obey consistency conditions called the hexagon and pentagon equations. Certain simple rearrangements have alternate ways of being achieved. The alternative paths need to agree.

###### Next Time:

With this, we have the rudiments of what we need to describe manipulation of anyon spaces. However, applying F-moves manually is rather laborious. Next time we’ll look into automating this using arcane type-level programming. You can take a peek at my trash WIP repo here

###### RefErences:
A big ole review on topological quantum computation: https://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1889
Ady Stern on The fractional quantum hall effect and anyons: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003491607001674

Another good anyon tutorial: https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.3275

Mathematica program that I still don’t get, but is very interesting: http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jamie.vicary/twovect/guide.pdf

Kitaev huge Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0506438

Bonderson thesis: https://thesis.library.caltech.edu/2447/2/thesis.pdf

Bernevig review: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.05805

More food for thought:

The Rosetta Stone: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/rosetta.pdf

http://blog.sigfpe.com/2008/08/hopf-algebra-group-monad.html

http://haskellformaths.blogspot.com/2012/03/what-is-hopf-algebra.html

## Variational Method of the Quantum Simple Harmonic Oscillator using PyTorch

A fun method (and useful!) for solving the ground state of the Schrodinger equation is to minimize the energy integral $dx \psi^\dagger H \psi$ while keeping the total probability 1. Pytorch is a big ole optimization library, so let’s give it a go.

I’ve tried two versions, using a stock neural network with relus and making it a bit easier by giving a gaussian with variable width and shift.

We can mimic the probability constraint by dividing by to total normalization $\int dx \psi^\dagger \psi$. A Lagrange multiplier or penalty method may allows us to access higher wavefunctions.

SGD seems to do a better job getting a rounder gaussian, while Adam is less finicky but makes a harsh triangular wavefunction.

The ground state solution of $-\frac{d^2\psi}{dx^2} + x^2\psi=E\psi$ is $e^{-x^2/2}$, with an energy of 1/2 (unless I botched up my head math). We may not get it, because we’re not sampling a very good total domain. Whatever, for further investigation.

Very intriguing is that pytorch has a determinant in it, I believe. That opens up the possibility of doing a Hartree-Fock style variational solution.

Here is my garbage

Edit: Hmm I didn’t compensate for the fact I was using randn sampling. That was a goof. I started using unifrom sampling, which doesn’t need compensation

## Attaching the Jordan Wigner String in Numpy

Just a fast (fast to write, not fast to run) little jordan wigner string code

What fun!